Abstract
Soil salinization has become one of the major environmental and socioeconomic issues globally and this is expected to be exacerbated further with projected climatic change. Determining how climate change influences the dynamics of naturally-occurring soil salinization has scarcely been addressed due to highly complex processes influencing salinization. This paper sets out to address this long-standing challenge by developing data-driven models capable of predicting primary (naturally-occurring) soil salinity and its variations in the world’s drylands up to the year 2100 under changing climate. Analysis of the future predictions made here identifies the dryland areas of South America, southern and western Australia, Mexico, southwest United States, and South Africa as the salinization hotspots. Conversely, we project a decrease in the soil salinity of the drylands in the northwest United States, the Horn of Africa, Eastern Europe, Turkmenistan, and west Kazakhstan in response to climate change over the same period.
Highlights
Soil salinization has become one of the major environmental and socioeconomic issues globally and this is expected to be exacerbated further with projected climatic change
One of the questions that arises from this research is if the projected changes in primary soil salinization can occur in the time scales (10–40 years or 50–80 years) used for projections, especially in inland arid regions where salt deposition is minimal and weathering very slow
Bannari and Al-Ali[85] examined the effect of climate change on spatio-temporal variability of soil salinity during the last 30 years (1987–2017) in the state of Kuwait using Landsat images and 100-geo-referenced soil data; for instance, only between 1987 and 1992, they estimated an increase equivalent to 350% in total area of salt-affected soils compared to the salt-affected area approximated in map of 1987 (433 km2)
Summary
Soil salinization has become one of the major environmental and socioeconomic issues globally and this is expected to be exacerbated further with projected climatic change. Even though the abovementioned purely spatial or spatio-temporal studies have substantially advanced our understanding of the current status of the salt-affected soils and processes involved in salinization, predictions of the future extent and dynamics of soil salinization at the global scale are still missing, partly due to the complex processes and many parameters influencing soil salinization at the global scale. This makes the future prediction of soil salinization in the face of future climate uncertainties a grand challenge, which is precisely one of the key objectives of the present investigation
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