An assessment of soil salinity and vegetation cover changes for a part of An-Najaf governorate using remote sensing data

This paper deals with assessing and detecting the changes of soil salinity and vegetation cover for a part of An-Najaf Governorate and verification regarding the impression of soil salinity on the change of vegetative regions, over the period from 2001 to 2015. The results demonstrated a clear reduction in vegetative cover with salinity rates increased. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and Soil Salinity Index (SI) were applied for each date using the multispectral images derived from Landsat ETM+ and OLI data. Then image differencing technique was utilized to detect the change/no-change for vegetation and salinity for the two study periods. The results revealed that soil salinity increased from 6.36 in 2001-2009 period to 10.59% in 2009-2015, whereas the vegetation cover deteriorated to 9.95 % for the same period. Finally, the strong inverse correlation which found in this paper between NDVI and SI emphasizes that vegetation cover on long term is heavily and directly affected by changes of soil salinity.