Many of the above-named elements could display a range of colours in soils, depending upon conditions such as redox potential and pH. In addition, the presence of organic matter and particular clay minerals also has a strong impact on soil colour, both in terms of hue and intensity. However, the concentration of the above elements is unlikely to be sufficiently high in soils to actually contribute to the overall soil colour,which will be dominated by organic matter and iron oxides (normally orange to
reddish, although blue in redoximorphic/gleyed soils is common), and the base colour of the mineral particles. However, the presence of the above elements in sufficient quantity may be indicative of soils with particular characteristics that do have an impact on colour, and so these characteristics could be acting as proxy indicators of specific elemental concentrations. The methodology applied in this work is
intended to demonstrate this.