LAUSR

Cadmium (Cd) can migrate in the soil and is readily absorbed by crops. High Cd accumulated in grains poses a huge threat to human health by inhibiting the function of the kidney system. Thus, it is crucial to reveal the content of soil Cd in vertical-depth series using a fast, real-time, and reliable method. For this purpose, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) combined with multivariate chemometrics was developed to analyze Cd content in the soil with vertical-depth series. Soil samples spiked with different levels of Cd were prepared, and LIBS spectra were obtained by single-pulse LIBS (SP-LIBS) and collinear double-pulse LIBS (CDP-LIBS) with wavelengths of 532 nm and 1064 nm. With appropriate parameters, CDP-LIBS showed better performance in detecting Cd than SP-LIBS. Partial least squares regression (PLSR), genetic algorithm (GA)-optimized back propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN), and particle swarm optimization (PSO)-optimized least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) were tested for quantitative analysis of the spectra after median absolute deviation (MAD), multiple scattering correction (MSC), wavelet transform (WT), spectral averaging, and normalization. PSO-optimized LS-SVM yielded an ideal result, with a coefficient of determination (R2, 0.999) and root mean square error (RMSE, 0.359 mg/Kg) in the prediction dataset. Finally, CDP-LIBS coupled with PSO-optimized LS-SVM was employed to analyze soil Cd content in vertical-depth series to reveal the migration pattern of Cd. Our results indicated that soil Cd had a significant positive relationship with the inverse of soil depth. However, Cd was mainly concentrated in 0-20 cm and rarely leached below 45 cm in the soil. This study suggests that LIBS and its enhancement techniques provide a reliable method for revealing the content of soil Cd in vertical-depth series.