This dataset accompanying the MOOC on soil applications contains an airborne hyperspectral HySpex image over the study site Demmin in Northern Germany which was recorded in October 2015. The surrounding area of Demmin is characterized by its glacial past and is largely used for agriculture. Here you can find relics of the ice age such as kettle holes - small, completely closed hollow shapes whose formation is attributed to the burial and subsequent thawing of an ice lens. Mostly overgrown nowadays by vegetation, SOC accumulates in these areas and higher contents are measured. The image dataset is fully pre-processed – all non-soil pixels are masked, the spectra were smoothed using a Savitzky-Golay Filter and transformed to first derivatives – and provided in BSQ format.

In addition to the HySpex image, this dataset contains a point data shapefile with 27 sampling locations, as well as information on the soil organic carbon (SOC) contents [g/kg]. The dataset is made publicly available as part of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) "Beyond the Visible - Imaging Spectroscopy for Soil Applications ", available from Spring 2023. Guidance on how to derive quantitative soil maps (SOC content) using the EnMAP-Box (QGIS plugin) are provided as videos at the HYPERedu YouTube channel, the soil MOOC course pages and the regression workflow documentation.

HYPERedu is an education initiative within the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP), a German hyperspectral satellite mission that aims at monitoring and characterizing the Earth’s environment on a global scale. EnMAP serves to measure and model key dynamic processes of the Earth’s ecosystems by extracting geochemical, biochemical and biophysical variables, which provide information on the status and evolution of various terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.