Determination of salinization in terms of when, where and how salinity may occur is vital for sustainable production and use of soils. Thus keeping track of changes of salinity and predict further salinization plays important role to timely detect salinization before causing detrimental effects to the environment. In reaction to that the present study applied long term prediction of salinity changes by means of deterministic modeling using SaltMod in a GIS environment. At the most basic level, the work undertaken in the study area has helped in mapping and characterizing the spatio-temporal salinity changes and identifying potentially affected areas within the study area under present conditions.
The lack of historical and difficulty to obtain existing data on salinity and groundwater in the area has presented difficulties and uncertainty of the results obtained. This led to preference and application of a point model (SaltMod) instead of spatial model (SahysMod) since the available data was not suitable for the use of the latter, resulting in a tedious and time consuming exercise. This has further raised concerns and uncertainty regarding the relevance and applicability of the model to the applied spatial scale. However by integrating the model into a GIS environment and geostatistical methods help in
accomplishment of the work.
In conclusion, the approach presented in the study is a key to a practical expert system to help respond to questions related to soil salinity management thereby way of prognostic analysis to detect salinization at early stages thus providing prevention measures rather than damage control. However, the results presented here should be taken as indicative due to uncertainties associated with large assumptions rather measured data, as is always the case with modelling in data-poor areas. Besides, though accuracy of prediction is uncertain, it is useful when trend of prediction is clear. As Oosterbaan states that, it would not be a disaster to design appropriate salinity control measures when a certain salinity level, predicted by the model to occur in 10 years time, will in reality occur a few years before or few years later.
Development of Methodologies for
Land Degradation Assessment Applied to
Land Use Planning in Thailand
