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Water harvesting (WH) and aquifer recharge (AR) have been promoted in recent decades as solutions to the overexploitation of groundwater resources in many countries around the world. Remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) technologies with multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) enable the analysis of many parameters to identify potential WH and AR sites and suitable zones for site-specific and cost-effective recharge structures. Iraq is located within an arid and semiarid region and thus suffers from water scarcity and absent surface water resources. The use of RS and GIS technology for detection of appropriate sites for WH and AR could potentially increase water availability. The criteria selected for determining appropriate WH and AR areas were runoff, drainage, geology, groundwater depth, slope, soil texture, and land use/land cover. The selection of these criteria was found to be more important and more frequent in a literature review for WH and AR, and the weightage of each criterion should be based on the opinion of experts. The obtained results indicated only five optimum sites for check dam construction for WH, due to their locations in suitable land class, slope (

The unified soil classification system (USCS) first proposed by Casagrande and subsequently developed by the Army Corps of Engineers. It widely used in many building codes and books. An-Najaf city is the most important city in Iraq due to its religious and spiritual value in the Muslim world, so it is fast expanding and continuous developing city in Iraq. The data from 464 boreholes in the study area for depths of 0–26 m have been used. 13 Soil samples were collected from each borehole with 13 depths level (0–26) m with 2 m intervals. The USCS was applied to the soil samples from 13 depth levels borehole. This research aims to create a geodatabase for soil properties for An-Najaf. The ArcGIS 10.5 software was used to interpolate the spatial data to produce 33 geotechnical maps for fine soil, coarse soil and USCS for 13 depth levels. For numerical soil data, Ordinary Kriging has been used for interpolation mapping of Fine and Coarse percentage data for each depth. For non-numerical (nominal) soil data (USCS class), the Indicator Kriging method is used. The results show that the coarse soil occupied 85–95% for depth 0–16 m and consist of (SP, SP-SM, SM) while fine soil occupied 5–15% consisting of (OL, CH, ML) subsequently, this soil when compacted has a permeability of pervious to semi impervious, good shearing strength, low to very low compressibility and acceptable workability as a construction material. The results also show that after 16 m depths until 26 m, the fine soil percentage increased to 40% with a coarse soil percentage of 60%, indicating changes in soil characteristics as the permeability became semi-pervious to impervious, fair shearing strength, medium compressibility and fair workability as a construction material. The study results will provide help and saving time, efforts and money in preliminary engineering designs. Validerad;2020;Nivå 2;2020-03-13 (johcin)

Al-Hawizeh Marsh is considered a major marsh in the south of Iraq with a longitude of 47° 32″–47° 45″ and latitude of 31° 30″–31° 42″, length of 80 km and width of 30 km, while the depth is from 1.5 to 4 m. It has a significant impact on the ecosystem and provides habitat for several types of living creatures. The surface water and the agricultural lands surrounding this marsh suffered from high level degrees of salinity. In the last decades, radical deterioration of water quality in this marsh happened because of the post-war-related events and several human activities. Landsat-8 data was used to predict and evaluate the spatial variation and map distributions of the salinity, SO4 and CaCO3 within Al-Hawizeh Marsh during the two seasons in the year 2017 based on the development of salinity and minerals mathematical equations. The evaluated values for salinity, SO4 and CaCO3 are found to be minimal in winter and maximum in autumn. The values of correlation coefficient (R2) between the real data and the equation results for the salinity, SO4 and CaCO3 during the two seasons are 0.95, 0.96 and 0.92, respectively.

Comparison of two conventional analytical techniques such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) for measuring Pb concentrations in soil samples was achieved using field and laboratory work. Seventy-three samples were collected from urban areas surrounding the large lead smelter at South Australia, as an indicator of the environment impact of smelter activity. Soil Pb concentrations were determined using hand-held XRF analyser under laboratory conditions. ICP-MS analysis on digested soils (using a microwave-assisted nitric acid digestion-extraction) was applied to validate p-XRF data. The analysis showed that Pb concentrations determined by XRF correlated with high linearity with Pb concentrations determined by ICP-MS measurements (R2 = 0.89). Statistical test (t test) was applied to the data of both methods applied without any significant difference between the two techniques. These results indicated that ICP-MS corroborated XRF for Pb soil measurements and suggests that XRF was a reliable and quick alternative to traditional analytical methods in studies of environmental health risk assessment, allowing for much larger sampling regimes in relatively shorter times and could be applied in the field. Validerad;2017;Nivå 2;2017-06-27 (andbra)