Soil salinity is a major threat to land productivity, water resources and agriculture in coastal areas and arid and semi-arid regions of the world. This has a significantly negative effect on the land and causes desertification. Monitoring salt accumulation in the soil is crucial for the prevention of land degradation in such environments. This study attempted to estimate and map soil salinity in Jaffna Peninsula, a semi-arid region of Sri Lanka.

Land degradation is becoming a serious concern for the sustainability of traditional agrosilvopastoral systems such as the Brazilian faxinal. The IAP (Environmental Institute of the Federal State of Paraná) is favoring the partial exclusion to grazing for 10 years as strategy both to recover degraded lands and to reduce negative effects. Nevertheless, this strategy is being followed by a reduced number of owners (faxinalenses) and little is known about the effectiveness of these measures due to either lack of field data and knowledge on faxinalenses’ perceptions.

The plant–microbe–soil nexus is critical in maintaining biogeochemical balance of the biosphere. However, soil loss and land degradation are occurring at alarmingly high rates, with soil loss exceeding soil formation rates. This necessitates evaluating marginal soils for their capacity to support and sustain plant growth. In a greenhouse study, we evaluated the capacity of marginal incipient basaltic parent material to support native plant growth and the associated variation in soil microbial community dynamics.