Soil resilience and adaptive capacity: A multi‐scale framework integrating climate extremes, soil quality, and remote sensing for sustainable land management in arid regions

Abstract

Soil degradation and desertification pose critical threats to the sustainability of arid ecosystems, undermining food security and land productivity. Traditional assessments have emphasized susceptibility mapping, but these approaches remain largely descriptive and fail to capture soil resilience, the capacity of soils to withstand, recover, or adapt under climatic and anthropogenic stress. This study introduces a multi‐scale soil resilience index that integrates soil quality indicators, desertification sensitivity metrics, and climate extremes with remote sensing proxies to evaluate adaptive capacity in arid lands. Thirty soil profiles from the Balat region of El‐Dakhla Oasis, Egypt, were analyzed for physicochemical properties, while Landsat‐derived vegetation and albedo indices were combined with a decade of rainfall, temperature, and wind data. Composite resilience maps classified soils into high, moderate, low, and very low resilience categories. Results revealed that resilience patterns were strongly influenced by salinity, sodicity, gypsum content, and climatic variability, with irrigated zones exhibiting higher adaptive capacity compared to fragile, unreclaimed soils. Validation against field observations confirmed robust agreement between modeled resilience and observed conditions (overall accuracy 82%, kappa = 0.78). By advancing beyond descriptive sensitivity mapping, this resilience‐based framework provides actionable insights for conservation planning and sustainable land management, supporting national strategies and global initiatives on land degradation neutrality.