Ecological monitoring of soils in the Mugan Desert of Azerbaijan

Soil-ecological monitoring is a scientific information system for monitoring changes in soil cover, assessing the state of soils, and predicting the impact of natural and anthropogenic factors on them. This monitoring shows the results of undesirable regional and global changes in soil cover and landscape and anthropogenic changes over time. Therefore it is important to study the change in the state of land used for crops in the Mugan Desert, where intensive farming is used and to make timely proposals to resolve these changes. The Mugan Desert is located in the southeastern part of the Kura-Araz lowland. The total area of the Mugan Desert is 455,332.5 ha. The main soils are gray-brown, sierozem-meadow, meadow-sierozem, bog-meadow, and alluvial-meadow soils, which are occupied by crops. These soils were the objects of study of the authors. Soil-ecological monitoring was carried out according to the method of G.V. Dobrovolsky and other scientists. Laboratory analyzes, which were taken from soil samples, were carried out according to generally accepted methods. The authors also collected and processed soil data from stock and literary materials of the period from 1980 to 1985 and the present. The authors found that in three of the four studied soil types over 40 years, an increase in crop-producing power was observed in one - it decreased. The content of humus in gray-brown soils increased by 0.20%, meadow-sierozem - by 0.14%, sierozem-meadow - by 0.12%, and in alluvial-meadow soils the content of humus decreased by 0.17%, nitrogen - by 0.02%, phosphorus - by 0.02%. Based on the analysis, the authors compiled a soil salinity map of the Mugan steppe (M 1: 100,000) and determined that alluvial-meadow soils were mainly subjected to low salinity (+0.19%), gray-brown - medium (+0.29%), meadow-sierozem (+0.67%) and sierozem-meadow soils (+0.44%) - to strong salinity. As a result of comparing our data on soil salinity in the study area with the data of G.Sh. Mamedov (2000), the authors found that the area of saline lands in the Mugan Desert increased from 33.9% to 66.1%, of which the area of weakly saline soils decreased from 24.24% to 10.58%, of moderately saline soils increased from 9.68% to 15.6, and highly saline also increased from 5.33% to 36.4%.