No abstract

Soil salinity has become one of the major problems 4 affecting crop production and food security in Mesopotamia, Iraq. 5 There is a pressing need to quantify and map the spatial extent and 6 distribution of salinity in the country in order to provide relevant 7 references for the central and local governments to plan sustain-8 able land use and agricultural development. The aim of this study 9 was to conduct such quantification and mapping in Mesopotamia 10 using an integrated, multiscale modeling approach that relies 11 on remote sensing. A multiyear, multiresolution, and multisen-12 sor dataset composed of mainly Landsat ETM+ and MODIS data 13 of the period 2009-2012 was used. Results show that the local-14 scale salinity models developed from pilot sites with vegetated and 15 nonvegetated areas can reliably predict salinity. Salinity maps pro-16 duced by these models have a high accuracy of about 82.5-83.3% 17 against the ground measurements. Regional salinity models devel-18 oped using integrated samples from all pilot sites could predict 19 soil salinity with an accuracy of 80% based on comparison to 20 regional measurements along two transects. It is hence concluded 21 that the multiscale models are reasonably reliable for assessment 22 of soil salinity at local and regional scales. The methodology 23 proposed in this paper can minimize problems induced by crop 24 rotation, fallowing, and soil moisture content, and has clear advan-25 tages over other mapping approaches. Further testing is needed 26 while extending the mapping approaches and models to other 27 salinity-affected environments.

No abstract