Geography

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    Environmental and Anthropogenic Degradation of Vegetation in the Sahel from 1982 to 2006
    (MDPI, 2016-11-13) Rishmawi, Khaldoun; Prince, Stephen D.
    There is a great deal of debate on the extent, causes, and even the reality of land degradation in the Sahel. Investigations carried out before approximately 2000 using remote sensing data suggest widespread reductions in biological productivity, while studies extending beyond 2000 consistently reveal a net increase in vegetation production, strongly related to the recovery of rainfall following the extreme droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, and thus challenging the notion of widespread, long-term, subcontinental-scale degradation. Yet, the spatial variations in the rates of vegetation recovery are not fully explained by rainfall trends. It is hypothesized that, in addition to rainfall, other meteorological variables and human land use have contributed to vegetation dynamics. Throughout most of the Sahel, the interannual variability in growing season ΣNDVIgs (measured from satellites, used as a proxy of vegetation productivity) was strongly related to rainfall, humidity, and temperature (mean r2 = 0.67), but with rainfall alone was weaker (mean r2 = 0.41). The mean and upper 95th quantile (UQ) rates of change in ΣNDVIgs in response to climate were used to predict potential ΣNDVIgs—that is, the ΣNDVIgs expected in response to climate variability alone, excluding any anthropogenic effects. The differences between predicted and observed ΣNDVIgs were regressed against time to detect any long-term (positive or negative) trends in vegetation productivity. Over most of the Sahel, the trends did not significantly depart from what is expected from the trends in meteorological variables. However, substantial and spatially contiguous areas (~8% of the total area of the Sahel) were characterized by negative, and, in some areas, positive trends. To explore whether the negative trends were human-induced, they were compared with the available data of population density, land use, and land biophysical properties that are known to affect the susceptibility of land to degradation. The spatial variations in the trends of the residuals were partly related to soils and tree cover, but also to several anthropogenic pressures.
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    Land Use and Degradation in a Desert Margin: The Northern Negev
    (MDPI, 2021-07-23) Prince, Stephen; Safriel, Uriel
    Degradation in a range of land uses was examined across the transition from the arid to the semi-arid zone in the northern Negev desert, representative of developments in land use taking place throughout the West Asia and North Africa region. Primary production was used as an index of an important aspect of dryland degradation. It was derived from data provided by Landsat measurements at 0.1 ha resolution over a 2500 km2 study region—the first assessment of the degradation of a large area of a desert margin at a resolution suitable for interpretation in terms of human activities. The Local NPP Scaling (LNS) method enabled comparisons between the observed NPP and the potential, nondegraded, reference NPP. The potential was calculated by normalizing the actual NPP to remove the effects of environmental conditions that are not related to anthropogenic degradation. Of the entire study area, about 50% was found to have a significantly lower production than its potential. The degree of degradation ranged from small in pasture, around informal settlements, minimally managed dryland cropping, and a pine plantation, to high in commercial cropping and extreme in low-density afforestation. This result was unexpected as degradation in drylands is often attributed to pastoralism, and afforestation is said to offer remediation and prevention of further damage.
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    Monitoring land degradation in Southern Africa by assessing changes in primary productivity.
    (2005-06-15) Wessels, Konrad; Prince, Stephen D.; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Land degradation is one of the most serious environmental problems of our time. Land degradation describes circumstances of reduced biological productivity. The fundamental goal of this thesis was to develop land degradation monitoring approaches based on remotely sensed estimates of vegetation production, which are capable of distinguishing human impacts from the effects of natural climatic and spatial variability. Communal homelands in South Africa (SA) are widely regarded to be severely degraded and the existence adjacent, non-degraded areas with the same soils and climate, provides a unique opportunity to test regional land degradation monitoring methods. The relationship between 1km AVHRR, growth season sumNDVI and herbaceous biomass measurements (1989-2003) was firstly tested in Kruger National Park, SA. The relationship was moderately strong, but weaker than expected. This was attributed to the fact that the small areas sampled at field sites were not representative of the spatial variability within 1x1km. The sumNDVI adequately estimated inter-annual changes in vegetation production and should therefore be useful for monitoring land degradation. Degraded areas mapped by the National-Land-Cover in north-eastern SA were compared to non-degraded areas in the same land capability units. The sumNDVI of the degraded areas was consistently lower, regardless of large variations in rainfall. However, the ecological stability and resilience of the degraded areas, as measured by the annual deviations from each pixel's mean sumNDVI, were no different to those of non-degraded areas. This suggests that the degraded areas may be in an alternative, but stable ecological state. To monitor human-induced land degradation it is essential to control for the effects of rainfall on vegetation production. Two methods were tested (i) Rain-Use Efficiency (RUE=NPP/Rainfall) and (ii) negative trends in the differences between the observed sumNDVI and the sumNDVI predicted by the rainfall using regressions calculated for each pixel (RESTREND). RUE had a strong negative correlation with rainfall and did not provide a reliable index of degradation. The RESTREND method identified areas in and around the degraded communal lands that exhibit negative trends in production per unit rainfall. This research made a significant contribution to the development of remote sensing based land degradation monitoring methods.