Exploring the use of Landsat imagery in assessing soil salinity in Kibiro Village,Hoima District

Abstract

Soil Salinity is an upcoming geo hazard that has enormous effects on vegetation and also non vegetation too. Cases of soil salinity were sighted in some parts of Kibiro Village because of the presence of salt farming. Since soil salinity is a dynamic process, it’s very essential to map it and be able to discover its extents in the area so that we are able to know how its spreading and be able to mitigate it accordingly. Therefore, this project focused on obtaining the area’s most appropriate salinity index, soil salinity extents and finally a trend analysis which were mapped in Kibiro village using Landsat Time series data with the help of E.C data that was obtained from the soil samples in the soil lab. The results obtained indicated that soil salinity was still in Kibiro but the intensity of soil salinity gradually reduced with time after the period of 20 years. This report is briefly organized into three chapters namely: The introduction, Literature review and finally the proposed methodology. In further detail, Chapter one fully describes the background of the problem, the problem statement, all the objectives of the study, justification and the study area. Chapter two is the literature review. It describes concepts about the definition of soil salinity, causes, effects, ways of soil salinity mitigation, indices etc. all obtained from previous studies carried out by different researchers. Chapter three portrays the methodology to be used for the study. It fully describes the methods and the respective data going to be used to attain the specific objectives of the study. It describes the methodology from downloading the satellite imagery, collection of sample ground data to the final stage of producing the trend analysis. Chapter four contains which is the results and analysis section, It contains results about the correlation of each salinity index, validation of the salinity index, the soil salinity map of Kibiro and the detailed trend analysis of soil salinity in Kibiro. Chapter five contains the final conclusion and recommendations in regards to the project.