2021/11/18 by Amirhossein Hassani, Adisa Azapagic, Nima Shokri · 17 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Agriculture, Soil, Plant Science #Climate change and permafrost #Soil Geostatistics and Mapping
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26907-3
openalex publication_date 2021/11/18 · openalex created_date 2021/11/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Soil salinization has become one of the major environmental and socioeconomic issues globally and this is expected to be exacerbated further with projected climatic change. Determining how climate change influences the dynamics of naturally-occurring soil salinization has scarcely been addressed due to highly complex processes influencing salinization. This paper sets out to address this long-standing challenge by developing data-driven models capable of predicting primary (naturally-occurring) soil salinity and its variations in the world's drylands up to the year 2100 under changing climate. Analysis of the future predictions made here identifies the dryland areas of South America, southern and western Australia, Mexico, southwest United States, and South Africa as the salinization hotspots. Conversely, we project a decrease in the soil salinity of the drylands in the northwest United States, the Horn of Africa, Eastern Europe, Turkmenistan, and west Kazakhstan in response to climate change over the same period.