Geo-Informatics for Combating Land Degradation and Desertification

Book excerpt: ’’Desertification’’ means land degradation in arid, semiarid, and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities. Combat Desertification advocates for the importance of inclusive cooperation to restore and rehabilitate degraded land and contribute towards achieving the overall Sustainable Development Goals. Land has been an overlooked component in sustainable development for years. Now, we view land as a vital link to provide solutions to cope with many other development challenges such as climate change, secure water and energy resources, promoting inclusive growth, and so on. It is widely accepted that satellite remote sensing and Geo-informatics system offers considerable advantages for land degradation and desertification assessments. With a comprehensive spatial coverage it is intrinsically synoptic, and provides objective, repetitive data which contribute to resource assessments and monitoring concepts of the process of desertification. However, if these observations can be coupled with GIS-based ecological modeling concepts, they may develop their full capacity to be used for modifying and adapting mitigation strategies.