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Identifying and managing risk factors for salt-affected soils: a case study in a semi-arid region in China

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Abstract

Soil salinization and desalinization are complex processes caused by natural conditions and human-induced risk factors. Conventional salinity risk identification and management methods have limitations in spatial data analysis and often provide an inadequate description of the problem. The objectives of this study were to identify controllable risk factors, to provide response measures, and to design management strategies for salt-affected soils. We proposed to integrate spatial autoregressive (SAR) model, multi-attribute decision making (MADM), and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for these purposes. Our proposed method was demonstrated through a case study of managing soil salinization in a semi-arid region in China. The results clearly indicated that the SAR model is superior to the OLS model in terms of risk factor identification. These factors include groundwater salinity, paddy area, corn area, aquaculture (i.e., ponds and lakes) area, distance to drainage ditches and irrigation channels, organic fertilizer input, and cropping index, among which the factors related to human land use activities are dominant risk factors that drive the soil salinization processes. We also showed that ecological irrigation and sustainable land use are acceptable strategies for soil salinity management.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by the National Natural Science Fund, China (No. 41301619 and 41130526). We express our sincere thanks to Mr. Yuanpei Zhang, Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center, Ningxia Academy of Agriculture and Forestry of China for the soil and groundwater salinity data and strong support during the study period. The authors want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments that led to a much improved manuscript.

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  1. Department of Land Resources Management, Zhejiang Gongshang University, 18 Xuezheng St., Xiasha University Town, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    De Zhou, Jianchun Xu & Li Wang

  2. Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, North Dakota State University, NDSU Dept.7620, PO Box 6050, Fargo, ND, 58108, USA

    Zhulu Lin

  3. Department of Land Resources Management, China Agricultural University, 2 Yuanmingyuan West Rd., Beijing, 100193, China

    Liming Liu

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  1. De Zhou
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Zhou, D., Xu, J., Wang, L. et al. Identifying and managing risk factors for salt-affected soils: a case study in a semi-arid region in China. Environ Monit Assess 187, 421 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-015-4639-7

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