Study in the affect of soil in desertification with the use of MEDALUS (Case Study Hable rood Catchments)

Nowadays, desertification as a great problems affect most of the countries in the world especially developing countries. Desertification phenomenon that occurs in arid, semi-arid and dry semi-wet regions will reduce the land potential. For evaluation and mapping of desertification many researches have been conducted leading to regional and local models. In this study MEDALUS model because of easy style and data accessibility and also compatible with the effective indices on land degradation was applied for land degradation intensity mapping with emphasis on soil criterion in Hablerood catchment. So in this study, soil criterion and 6 indices including: EC, Rock fragment, depth and texture of soil, slope, and percentage of soil organic matter were assessed. At the first work units was prepared; in each work unit, one soil profile was dogged (10 profiles) and desired indices were measured in laboratory. Finally, sensitive map of region was extracted using assigned score to each index and geometric average of all indices. Data were analyzed by using spss software and analysis method of various one- way ANOVA. The results showed that, about 4.16 percent of the area is classified under low class and in the level of 0.05 there was no significant differences between indices, and the only significant difference was in the gravel percentage of soil surface in 0.01 levels.