Retrieval of soil salinity from Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery

Abstract

ABSTRACT Soil salinity is a widespread environmental hazard and the main causes of land degradation and desertification, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. The first step in finding such a solution is providing accurate information about the severity and extent of the salinity spread in affected areas; this can be done by mapping the electrical conductivity (EC) of the soil. Utilizing the potential of high-resolution satellite imagery along with remote sensing techniques is a promising method to map salinity, as it allows for large-scale monitoring and provides high accuracy and efficiency. This paper, therefore, aims at assessing soil salinity by mapping the EC of soils, using satellite imagery from the newly launched Sentinel-2 satellite as well as Landsat-8 data. A field study was carried out using those data, and various salt features were extracted that relate the EC values of field samples to satellite-derived salt features. The study used two different regression approaches MLP and SVR. Additionally, two feature selection algorithms, GA and SFS, were implemented on the data to improve model performance. The study concludes that the proposed method for modeling salinity and the mapping of soil EC can be considered an effective approach for soil salinity monitoring.