Retrieval of soil salinity from Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery

ABSTRACTSoil salinity is a widespread environmental hazardand the main causes of land degradationand desertification, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. The first step in finding such a solution is providing accurate information about the severity and extent of the salinity spread in affected areas; this can be done by mapping the electrical conductivity (EC) of the soil. Utilizing the potential of high-resolution satellite imageryalong with remote sensing techniques is a promising method to map salinity, as it allows for large-scale monitoring and provides high accuracy and efficiency. This paper, therefore, aims at assessing soil salinityby mapping the EC of soils, using satellite imageryfrom the newly launched Sentinel-2 satellite as well as Landsat-8 data. A field study was carried out using those data, and various salt features were extracted that relate the EC values of field samples to satellite-derived salt features. The study used two different regression approaches MLP and SVR. Addit...