A Novel Regional-Scale Assessment of Soil Metal Pollution in Arid Agroecosystems

This work is a novel trial to integrate geostatistics with fuzzy logic under the geographic information system (GIS) environment model soil pollution. Soil samples from seventy-one profiles in northern Nile Delta, Egypt, and were analyzed for total concentrations of Cd, Co, Cu, Pb, Ni, Zn. Metal distribution maps generated using ordinary kriging methods. They normalized by linear non-linear membership functions (FMFs) overlain operators (And, OR, Sum, Product, Gamma). The final validated area curve (AUC) receiver operating characteristic (ROC). best-fitted semivariogram models Gaussian circular Co Zn, exponential Cu. ROC AUC analysis revealed that FMFs more effective than modeling Overall, highest value (0.866; very good accuracy) resulted applying Sum overly non-linearly layers, implying superiority this decision-making studied area. Accordingly, 92% investigated soils severely polluted. Our study would increase insight into metal pollution on regional scale, especially arid regions.