Soil salinity is a major threat to land productivity, water resources and agriculture in coastal areas and arid and semi-arid regions of the world. This has a significantly negative effect on the land and causes desertification. Monitoring salt accumulation in the soil is crucial for the prevention of land degradation in such environments. This study attempted to estimate and map soil salinity in Jaffna Peninsula, a semi-arid region of Sri Lanka. A Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) model was constructed using Sentinel 2A satellite imagery and field-measured soil electrical conductivity (EC) values. The results showed that satisfactory prediction of the soil salinity could be made based on the PLSR model coupled with Sentinel 2A satellite imagery (R2 = 0.69, RMSE = 0.4830). Overall, 32.8% of the land and 45% of paddy lands in Jaffna Peninsula are affected by salt. The findings of this study indicate that PLSR is suitable for the soil salinity mapping, especially in semi-arid regions like Jaffna Peninsula. The results underpin the importance of building adaptive capacity and implementing suitable preventive strategies for sustainable land and agricultural management.
Authors and Publishers
Gopalakrishnan, TharaniKumar, Lalit
Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050; CODEN: SUSTDE) is an international, cross-disciplinary, scholarly and open access journal of environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. Sustainabilityprovides an advanced forum for studies related to sustainability and sustainable development, and is published monthly online by MDPI.
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MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.
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MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.