Soil-Quality Assessment during the Dry Season in the Mun River Basin Thailand

Abstract

The Mun River Basin is one of Thailand’s major grain-producing areas, but the production is insufficient, and most of the cultivated lands are rain-fed and always unused in the dry season. All this makes it necessary to determine the status of soil nutrients and soil quality in the dry season to improve soil conditions, which will be useful for cultivation in the farming period. The aim of this study was to construct a soil-quality assessment based on soil samples, and in the process the minimum data set theory was introduced to screen the assessment indicators. The geographically weighted regression method was used to complete the spatial interpolation process of indicators, and the fuzzy logic model was constructed to evaluate the soil quality. The results showed that the spatial distributions of soil quality and indicators were similar. The soil quality was the best in the upstream while poor in the downstream, and the dry fields in the west and the forests in the east of the basin were better than other areas nearby. However; the soil qualities of paddy fields in the middle and east of the basin were poor due to the lack of soil nutrient supply when the fields were unused

Keywords

• Mun River
• soil quality
• GWR
• fuzzy logic model
• dry season