Site-specific management of salt affected soils: A case study from Egypt

In Egypt all agricultural practices are generally applied uniformly without taking spatial variability into consideration, which is not efficient and may be more expensive than site-specific management approach. This is based on accurate assessment of within-field variation and on field delineation into homogeneous zones to be submitted to differential management. Multivariate geostatistics allows to assess and model the spatial variation of a set of soil attributes influencing management. The objective of this paper was to propose an approach for determining spatially variable rate application (VRA) of leaching water, to control soil salinity, and of fertilizer to improve productivity while reducing environmental impact. The research was conducted in an experimental 3.1-ha field in Egypt and the following soil attributes were measured: electrical conductivity (ECe), available nitrogen (N), available phosphorus (P), available potassium (K) and organic matter content (OM). Ordinary cokriging was applied to produce thematic maps of soil attributes and the appropriateness of the linear model of coregionalization was evaluated with cross-validation. Spatial maps of the five soil variables were classified into three isofrequencies classes and the mean values were calculated for each class. These values were then compared with critical reference values to assess the local soil requirements for reducing soil salinity and/or improving soil fertility. The results showed that the estimations of soil attributes were unbiased and accurate. Only for ECe and available nitrogen site-specific management would be preferable because it would reduce the agricultural costs for both soil reclamation (saving water used to leach salts) and improvement of soil N fertility in comparison with the traditional uniform methods. The proposed approach, though producing encouraging results, would require improvements in the determination of the threshold values used to plan salt leaching and soil fertilization.