Ecological Risk Assessment of Soil Salinity in Arid and Semi-arid Areas

In the recent era, soil salinization has remained as one of the largest widespread environmental concerns, responsible for land degradation and desertification. The most alarming thing of this hazard is its way of propagation, predicted to affect vigorously more fertile areas worldwide in the coming years, namely in arid and semi-arid areas. In these zones, the lack of water resources combined with extreme weather conditions limits salts leachability, thus leading to a net increase of salt concentration within soil layers. The higher concentrations of salts have detrimental impacts on soil physicochemical and biological properties, causing thereby numerous damages to crop yield sustainability, civil infrastructures as well as the social well-being of the country. Current studies report that soil salinity is transforming fertile areas into barren unproductive lands, leading to economical loss of billion dollars annually. Therefore, it is imperative to discuss thoroughly about soil salinity issues, namely in arid and semi-arid areas, which are characterized as hot spots of soil salinization. This work aims at critical analysis of the salinity impacts on ecosystem biodiversity, human health and civil engineering facilities. Various classical desalinization techniques have been applied, including chemical amendment, irrigation and use of salt-tolerant plants. However, in field uses, their efficiency was not satisfactory, namely with low permeable soils. By contrast, electrokinetic technique (EKT) is a novel widely admitted process for soils remediation. During EKT, a set of mechanism is generated including electroosmosis, electromigration and electrophoresis, combined with electrolysis and geo-chemical reactions. These phenomena result in mobilization and removal of noxious salts followed with a net decrease of soil salinity. The current provided information would help to provide a useful future roadmap for the upcoming investigations in this domain for sustainable remediation of salinity problems around the globe.