UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

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Author: search.filters.author.Rishmawi, KhaldounSubject: search.filters.subject.AVHRR

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    SPATIAL PATTERNS AND POTENTIAL MECHANISMS OF LAND DEGRADATION IN THE SAHEL
    (2013) Rishmawi, Khaldoun; Prince, Stephen; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    There is a great deal of debate on the extent, causes and even the reality of land degradation in the Sahel. On one hand, extrapolations from field-scale studies suggest widespread and serious reductions in biological productivity threatening the livelihoods of many communities. On the other hand, coarse resolution remote sensing studies consistently reveal a net increase in vegetation production exceeding that expected from the recovery of rainfall following the extreme droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, thus challenging the notion of widespread, subcontinental-scale degradation. Yet, the spatial variations in the rates of vegetation recovery are not fully explained by rainfall trends which suggest additional causative factors. In this dissertation, it is hypothesized that in addition to rainfall other climatic variables and anthropogenic uses of the land have had measurable impacts on vegetation production. It was found that over most of the Sahel, the interannual variability in growing season sum NDVI (used as a proxy of vegetation productivity) was strongly related to rainfall, humidity and temperature while the relationship with rainfall alone was generally weaker. The climate- sum NDVI relationships were used to predict potential NDVI; that is the NDVI expected in response to climate variability alone excluding any human-induced changes in productivity. The differences between predicted and observed NDVI were regressed against time to detect any long term (positive or negative) trends in vegetation productivity. It was found that over most of the Sahel the trends either exceeded or did not significantly depart from what is expected from the trends in climate. However, substantial and spatially contiguous areas (~8% of the total area of the Sahel) were characterized by significant negative trends. To test whether the negative trends were in fact human-induced, they were compared with the available data on population density, land use pressures and land biophysical properties that determine the susceptibility of land to degradation. It was found that the spatial variations in the trends of the residuals were not only well explained by the multiplicity of land use pressures but also by the geography of soil properties and percentage tree cover.