Spatial Variability of some Soil Physiochemical and Fertility Properties in Northern Nile-Delta of Egypt

Abstract

Availability of more accurate soil's data is very limited for most areas worldwide; however, these data are very crucial for the management and sustainability of land resources. The main objectives of this work were to provide more accurate data about soil physical, chemical and fertility properties and their spatial variability within the studied area northern of Nile-Delta in Egypt. Therefore 19 representative soil profiles were dug throughout the studied area. Fifty-nine soil samples were collected from the identified horizons and these samples were analyzed for their soil physical, chemical and fertility properties. The inverse distant weighting (IDW) approach was used in developing the spatial interpolation maps of these properties. The obtained results revealed that the studied soil physical, chemical and fertility properties were highly associated with soil parent material. Coarse-textured soils developed on sand dunes were higher in their bulk density and total carbonates; whereas they were lower in total porosity, saturation percentage (SP), organic matter (OM), CEC and NPK. On the contrary, fine-textured soils developed on Nile-silt deposits were higher in their total porosity, SP, OM, CEC and NPK. It was also found that one third of the studied soils were affected by soil salinity. Areas affected by soilalkalinity due to magnesium were larger than those caused by sodium. This could be attributed to their proximity from the lakes in the area and/ or see water intrusion. Accordingly, the studied area was affected by soil salinity and poor fertility which needs to the application of proper management and sustainability programs.

Characterization of The Spatial Variability of Some Soil Physicochemical Properties of The El-Gallaba Plain, New Aswan City, Aswan Governorate, Egypt.

“…In addition, knowledge of the temporal and spatial variations of soil properties is important to evaluate the effects of agricultural works on environmental characteristics (Arnous and Hassan 2006;Goenster-Jordan et al, 2018). The Kriging method is the most powerful and effective interpolation method used in geostatistics applications However, many researchers have used GIS and geostatistics techniques as decision tools in many agricultural applications for the spatial interpolation of soil characteristics, land evaluation, and land suitability assessment (Da Silva et al, 2015;Mevlut 2016;Chang et al, 2014;Swify et al, 2017;Yousif, 2019;Aldabaa and Yousif 2020;Elnaggar 2021;Amer et al, 2021;Selmy et al, 2020 andNada et al, 2022;Abdullahi et al 2023;Okashaa, 2023).…”