The soil-adjusted vegetation index for soil salinity assessment in Uzbekistan

Soil salinization, as one of the threats of land degradation, is the main environmental issue in Uzbekistan due to its aridic climate. One of the most vulnerable areas to soil salinization is Sirdarya province in Uzbekistan. The main human-induced causes of soil salinization are the insufficient operation of drainage and irrigation systems, irregular observations of the agronomic practices, and non-efficient on-farm water use. All of these causes considerably interact with the level of the groundwater, leading to an increase in the level of soil salinity. The availability of historical data on actual soil salinity in agricultural lands helps in formulating validated generic state-of-the-art approaches to control and monitor soil salinization by remote sensing and geo-information technologies. In this paper, we hypothesized that the Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index-based results in soil salinity assessment give statistically valid illustrations and salinity patterns. As a study area, the Mirzaabad district was taken to monitor soil salinization processes since it is the most susceptible territory of Sirdarya province to soil salinization and provides considerably less agricultural products. We mainly formulated this paper based on the secondary data, as we downloaded satellite images and conducted an experiment against the in-situ method of soil salinity assessment using the Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index. As a result, highly saline areas decreased by a factor of two during the studied period (2005–2014), while non-saline areas increased remarkably from a negligible value to over 10 000 ha. Our study showed that arable land suitability for agricultural purposes has been improving year by year, and our research held on this district also proved that there was a gradual decrease in high salt contents on the soil surface and land quality has been improved. The methodology has proven to be statistically valid and significant to be applied to other arid zones for the assessment of soil salinity. We assume that our methodology is surely considered as a possible vegetation index to evaluate salt content in arable land of either Uzbekistan or other aridic zones and our hypothesis is not rejected by this research.