Global predictions of primary soil salinization under changing climate in the 21st century

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.

Subjects

MLE@TUHH

DDC Class

004: Informatik

550: Geowissenschaften

600: Technik

More Funding Information

We gratefully acknowledge the funding by the Presidential Doctoral Scholarship Award at The University of Manchester, UK Research Councils (grant no. EP/K011820/1) and the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics at Hamburg University of Technology. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

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publishedVersion

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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s41467-021-26907-3.pdf

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4.15 MB

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Global predictions of primary soil salinization under changing climate in the 21st century