Land degradation vulnerability zone identification and monitoring using geospatial technology

Abstract

Land degradation is one of the disastrous environmental problems of newlinethe global community It is a long term process caused due to both natural as newlinewell as human activities and may be exacerbated through the combined newlineeffects of different land degradation process Continuous monitoring through newlinemapping and surveying could help to understand the intensity and the spatial newlinepatterns of land degradation But it is difficult to map land degradation of a newlinehuge country like India by using traditional mapping and survey methods newlineRemote Sensing techniques have demonstrated an immense potential in long newlineterm mapping and monitoring of the environmental process With decades of newlineremote sensing imagery it is possible to study the phenological changes over newlinethe time at any scale This research used several remote sensing data products newlineto detect and identify the hot spots of land degradation and quantify the newlinespatio temporal changes of land degradation to the state level This study also newlinestudied the sensitivity of land degradation in district level by identified a pilot newlinearea based on the state level results and used the field collected data with newlineremotely accessed data newlineThirteen years of climatic data have been considered for the state level newlineland degradation analysis Precipitation net primary productivity aridity newlineindex rainfall use efficiency and slope are the parameters taken from different newlinesensors rescaled and analysed Analysis of precipitation results shows that It newlinecould be a major cause behind the ongoing land degradation process If the newlinetrend persists in the future the semi arid region could be turned into arid newlinezone The overall results show that the spatio temporal changes in the land newlinedegradation by the severity zone map This offers a unique way to identify the newlinehot spots of land degradation over the thirteen years which helps to pick the newlinepilot study area for the land degradation zone sensitivity mapping newline