A Survey of Soil Salinity in Iran's Drylands

About 80 percent of the world's agricultural lands, supplying nearly 60 percent of all human food, is under rain-fed cultivation. Considering the uneven distribution of global rainfall, arid and semi-arid areas call for measures to prevent soil and water salinization. Being one of the most important resources for agricultural production, especially in the face of the current restrictions on the development of irrigated lands, drylands are especially stressed by soil salinity as an important limitation on dry farming, which causes decreased production especially when combined with other limitations such as lack of moisture. In order to gain an enlightened knowledge of the salinity status of rain-fed lands in Iran, a research project of national-scale including 849 study sites was performed and soil samples were collected from different depths across the study sites to determine their Electrical Conductivity (EC) as well as soil physical and chemical characteristics. The results showed that the highest and lowest salinity levels of the surface soil (depths of 0-30 cm) in rain-fed lands under cultivation were 97.5 and 0.19 dS/m, respectively, with an average value of 2.28 dS/m while more than 50% of the soils collected exhibited salinity levels greater than 0.6 dS/m. The results of principal component analysis showed that the variability of soil salinity in rain-fed lands were affected by climatic parameters (such as temperature and precipitation as well as indices resulting from their interactions including standardized precipitation indices and effective drought). Moreover, soil characteristics such as organic carbon, clay, and soluble salt (especially sodium) contents were found to have due effects on salinity level.