Читать книгу Climate Impacts on Sustainable Natural Resource Management - Группа авторов - Страница 36

Desertification is an extreme type of condition faced worldwide. Remotely sensed data and geospatial techniques provide important information for assessing desertification and its mapping at a local and global extent. It is a change in land condition that was not desertic into desert type landscapes and is closely linked to factors like population growth, improper farming practices, and widespread crops in naturally fragile environments. It occurs due to a lack of water reserves, humus‐depleted soils, scarce vegetation, and repeated plowing. The consequences of desertification can be dreadful for societies. Geospatial technology is utilized to determine the soil types, vegetation classification, land use classification, and nutrient availability in a region. Integration and weighted overlay of various factors in a GIS system result in vegetation, climate, soil, and management indices. The final product created after superimposing other indices creates a desertification sensitivity index. This index can help assess the stage of desertification of the study area (Lamqadem et al. 2018; Bedoui 2020).