Investigating and comparing the effects of agricultural activities on soil destructive characters

Regarding population growth, increasing agricultural land is necessary to provide food and meet existing needs. This issue has led to land degradation because of mismanagement and excessive exploitation. Therefore, much research must be done to determine whether agriculture leads to land degradation or not. Regarding the importance of this issue in arid and semi-arid regions, the Eshtehard region was selected as the study area in this research. Different maps of the area including soil map, altitudes, and land-use were prepared using ArcGIS 9.3 and ENVI software. After visiting the area and determining the main land-uses including rangeland (as control sample), fallow lands, monoculture lands, multicultural lands, and garden lands, soil sampling was carried out in two depths of 0-30 and 30-60 centimeters with three replications for each treatment. Finally, 35 soil samples were transferred to the laboratory, and soil degradation factors such as salinity, sodium, sodium adsorption ratio, and acidity were measured in each soil sample. After determining the normality of the data using the Shapiro test, the study of factors with non-parametric Tukey test showed that there was a significant difference between treatments in the region. Then, a comparison of surface and subsurface layers for each factor was done using a t-test in SPSS software. The results showed that multicultural treatment with the highest score was the most desirable treatment and fallow treatment with the lowest score was the most undesirable treatment, leading to soil degradation in the region.