Spatio analysis of soil quality assessment in semi-arid ecosystem using a minimum data set

Abstract

Land degradation especially as a result of the rapid increase in demand and pressure in the population, have emerged as one of the most important problems. Many model approaches, especially regarding land degradation and desertification, have been developed and continue to be developed on the world. The MEDALUS (Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use) which is one of the famous models has been developed for an environment assessment program contributed to by 31 groups and 10 countries in 1999. This model includes the Environmental Sensitive Areas (ESA) index include climate, soil, land use-land cover, and management index. This current study aims to evaluate the soil quality indexes by using the total data set (TDS) and minimum data set (MDS) of the lands in Konya Basin, which is an arid and semiarid terrestrial ecosystem, with MEDALUS approach. The TDS consisted of nine soil quality parameters measured on 1019 samples: pH, Electrical Conductivity (EC), Organic Matter (OM), texture, CaCO3, depth, parent material, and slope. In addition, Principal components analysis (PCA) was used to determine which parameters were to be selected in the MDS. The MDS parameters consisted of slope, pH, OM, CaCO3. After those process, different interpolation models in order to create spatial distribution maps of parameters and SQI (Soil Quality Index). Results classified 13.59% of the total area has as low, while 84.110% of the study area’ soil indicated area moderate by the SQI in terms of. Accordingly MDS, it was determined that 80.41% of the study area was in the medium-quality category, while only 2.01% was in the high-quality category. In the study area, minimum data set is seen that similar to the soil quality distribution in the total data set.

Keywords

• Soil quality index
• principal components analysis
• arid-semi arid
• Konya basin

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