I m not sur to understand your question or to be able to answer but i try to share my experience :

I have been trying to compare organic matter from palaoesol with organic matter from present functionnal soil at different depth. This was sometimes successful and sometimes the NIR signal was to much different or with very "low signal"

To generalize i would say that Holocene palaeosoils  are suitable but not the older one (soils in loess pleistocene stratigraphy for example)

I would say that the comparison with palaeosols even older that went through stronger diagenesis processes are even more difficult to compare especially for OM

Best regards

Damien

Dear Damien

Thanks a lot for your responce

I'm interested in issues of last stages Holocene soils and have samples of different age soils (from 1000 BP to 5000 BP and older).  With your experience of research in this area what do you think which method will be better: Near-Infrared Spectroscopy or Infrared spectroscopy, or  Raman spectroscopy ? or other methods  ?

Best wishes

Yuriy

It depends on the parameter you would like to measure.

For organic matter i prefer NIRS than IR because it behaves like a physical filter to produce a fingerprint of soil organic matter. I have no experience with Raman

In the NIRSqual project, the approach is qualitative. We compare the fingerprint of soil organic matter we know (from well described ecosystem), compiled in a referential, with soil organic matter we would like to know better (from deep horizon or palaeosoil).

If you are interested to compare your palaeosoil with our NIRSqual referential, please contact me by email or check Ertlen et al. 2010 EJSS.

[email protected]

Best regards