Interrelationships of Land Use/Cover Change and Topography with Soil Acidity and Salinity as Indicators of Land Degradation

Abstract

Abstract:As soil is the basis of all terrestrial ecosystems, degraded soil means lower fertility, reduced biodiversity and reduced human welfare. Therefore the focus of this paper is on elucidating the influence of land use and land cover (LULC) change on two important soil quality indicators that are fundamental to effective measures for ameliorating soil degradation; namely soil acidity and soil salinity in the Lower Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia. First, Analysis of Variance was used to elucidate the effects of LULC categories on soil acidity and salinity. The results indicate that soils under Vineyard have significantly higher pH. In contrast there is no significant effect of LULC or its change on soil salinity. To further elucidate the complex interactions of these soil quality indicators with landscape attributes over 20 years and other terrain attributes, multivariate ordination techniques (correspondence analysis and canonical correspondence analysis) were used. The results show that elevation exerted a more dominant influence on pH than the LULC types and their dynamics. In comparison, salinity of the soil appears to be higher in subsoil layers under woodland than under other LULC categories. The environmental implications of these interactions, as evidenced by this study, provide some insights for future land use planning in the region.

A standardized soil quality index for diverse field conditions

“…This SQI concept can be innovated by replacing the soil type descriptions with arbitrary ranges of soil texture descriptions to enable regional SQI comparisons. Besides management choices (e.g., NT, CT), other factors that reportedly influence agricultural production, and were not modeled in this study include: crop hybrids, microbial activity, pests occurrence, solar insolation, planting dates, fertilizer application and intake rates, and the weather patterns (Bouma, 2002;Bouma and McBratney, 2013;Manandhar and Odeh, 2014). Because, the year 2012 was a drought year, this SQI approach will be tested with data from subsequent years to determine its efficacy.…”

Assessment of the Sustainability of the Territories Affected by Gully Head Advancements through Aerial Photography and Modeling Estimations: A Case Study on Samal Watershed, Iran

“…One of these changes due to the topography is the increase in sodium and acidification of the soils, also coincident with our findings. Moreover, these impacts can be more extreme if both factors interact with land use changes due to agricultural practices and grazing [58]. The gully upstream watershed area, the distance from the gully head to the watershed ridge, the height of the gully head, and the gully head advancement, can explain about 85% of the total variance.…”

Understanding soil erosion processes in Mediterranean sloping vineyards (Montes de Málaga, Spain)

“…Within the viticultural agroecosystem, soils play a major role in providing mineral nutrients to plants, and soil characteristics also affect vine water status which is a key factor determining grape quality potential (van Leeuwen et al, 2009). The alteration of natural hydrological dynamics and increased sediment transport create several problems related to uncontrolled solute and nutrient transport (Gruber and Kosegarten, 2002;Manandhar and Odeh, 2014;Navel and Martins, 2014), soil loss (Hacisalihoglu, 2007;Novara et al, 2011;Prosdocimi et al, 2016b;Quiquerez et al, 2014), formation of rills and ephemeral gullies (Kosmas et al, 1997;Martínez-Casasnovas et al, 2003;Rodrigo Comino et al, 2015), degradation of roots, biodiversity and carbon storage (Bruggisser et al, 2010;Eldon and Gershenson, 2015;Francone et al, 2010;Gagnarli et al, 2015;Zsófi et al, 2011), and quality of the product and productivity (García-Díaz et al, 2016;Likar et al, 2015;Lorenzo et al, 2012;Marqués et al, 2015;Terrón et al, 2015). To understand the soil erosion processes in vineyards will bring solutions for a sustainable agriculture (Novara et al, 2013) and this is related to the income of the farmers due to payments for ecosystem services (Galati et al, 2016) and the soil erosion rates (Novara et al, 2016a), and the soil carbon sequestration (Novara et al, 2016b).…”