Аннотация:Agricultural lands are the main source of products for humans and strategically important economic resource. The national food security and related sectors of economy highly depend on their quality and condition. Due to social and economic situation, the significant reduction of irrigated lands occurred and many monitoring programs ceased in the late 1990s in the south of Russia. At present, there is the growing concern about the modern state of soils under uncontrolled anthropogenic pressure which favors the development of new monitoring programs and concepts based on the modern achievements and technologies. One of the promising technique for monitoring land resources is the remote sensing. The aim of our research is to study the current state of irrigated soils and their properties such as salinity, humus content and carbonates using ground truth and remote sensing data with Svetloyarsk irrigation system (Volgograd oblast) as a case study. The field studies were conducted in June-July of 2015 and 2016. The samples were collected from three transects and the random-regular grid. The square of the studied area is 130 ha. The crops are represented by cereals (wheat, barley) and perennial grasses (alfalfa). The high resolution space-borne Pleiades imagery (19.05.2015) was used. The maps of soil properties were compiled using RStudio. After 50-year irrigation, the following changes have been observed: 1) the area of irrigated lands as well as the specific water consumption for irrigation have decreased which resulted in the fall of water table below 3-5 meters; 2) the structure of agricultural use has changed, mainly due to the increase in the relative areas of the crops of winter cereals; 3) the soil cover has changed drastically due to the complete transformation of initial soil morphological and chemical properties: 4) the readily soluble salts have been washed from the upper to the second meter of soil profile; 5) the process of irrigation-induced accumulation of carbonates occurs at the top soil layer, which can be easily observed from the space as a patchy pattern; 6) the soils of the investigated area are characterized by a low content of humus. Thus, our research made it possible to obtain information on the current state of the soil cover of irrigated lands and propose the recommendations for the sustainable management of soils.