Evaluating Soil Fertility Degradation Due to Crop Residue Burning: Implications for Sustainable Agriculture

Crop burning is an age-old issue that is practiced by farmers mostly for clearing the fields. This practice causes environmental pollution ranging from reducing soil fertility to human health. This study utilized multi-geospatial processing platforms: Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) to derive Normalized burn ratio (NBR), and pre/post-fire ΔNBR for 2015 and 2023 to identify burnt fields and changes in burning practices. Further, the study relied upon on-field data to assess soil properties pre/post-fire date of 2023 in selected fields within Babil governorate. Overall, the study found that the leveraging of cloud-based geospatial platforms performed well in detecting burnt fields with a noticeable decrease in fire hotspots of 2023 when compared to 2015. The results of pre/post burning analysis soil samples showed that soil nutrients are declined. Among the measured soil properties, Nitrogen and soil organic matter are highly declined in average of 30% for nitrogen and 45% for O.M. While the average of decreasing in CEC and CaCO3 ranged from 5 to 15%. A slightly increased are observed for pH, salinity, Ca, Na, Mg, and Potassium. Open wheat field burning depletes soil organic matters and nutrients contents and away all the essential that make the topsoil healthy. The fire severity classification results indicated a dominant of low severity class over all selected Wheat-cultivated fields with value ranged from 22 to 86% of the burned area. A low correspondence was observed for low to moderate severity class with accuracy of 47.58%, suggesting high misidentification of these classes. Moreover, the study findings confirmed the effectiveness of utilizing multi- processing platforms approaches to overcome the misidentification of residue burnt fields.