Assessing onion salt tolerance using soil apparent electrical conductivity directed soil sampling, planet scope derived yield maps, and boundary analysis

Gopal R. Mahajan, Elia Scudiero, Amninder Singh, Aliasghar Montazar and Dennis L. Corwin

Agricultural Water Management, 2025, vol. 318, issue C

Abstract: Plant-salt tolerance parameters support decision making directed at conserving water in salt-affected farmland. Traditional methods for determining crop salt tolerance are labor-intensive and often do not accurately represent on-farm growing conditions. This research on dehydrated processing onion evaluates a novel approach utilizing boundary line analysis (BLA) for plant salt tolerance determination. We used soil and plant near-ground and remote sensing to generate extensive datasets (over 3900 yield-salinity data pairs) with limited ground-truth data (20 or fewer samples per field over four onion fields). First, root-zone soil salinity was mapped (R2=0.82) using apparent electrical conductivity through ensemble modeling with field-specific and multi-field regressions. Second, onion yield was mapped (R2=0.82) using a novel time-series analysis of daily PlanetScope surface reflectance. Third, a novel resampling procedure was applied to fit a BLA-based Maas and Hoffman salt tolerance curve to the upper boundary of the salinity × yield data point cloud. The examined onion variety was classified as moderately salt-tolerant, with a soil salinity threshold of 3.05 dS m−1 and a relative yield decrement slope of 2.27 % at higher salinity levels. This proof-of-concept research demonstrated the feasibility of BLA-based crop salt tolerance determination using geospatial soil and plant sensing with limited ground sampling. Crop breeding programs may use the proposed methodology to determine salt tolerance in new crops in realistic environmental and management conditions and potentially reduce the labor required for traditional salt tolerance curve determination.

Keywords: Salinity control; Irrigation management; Water conservation; Plant salt tolerance; On-farm experiments; Boundary line analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377425003932
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:318:y:2025:i:c:s0378377425003932

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2025.109679

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().