期刊名称：ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
印刷版ISSN：2194-9042
电子版ISSN：2194-9050
出版年度：2006
卷号：XXXVI Part 4
出版社：Copernicus Publications
摘要：Desertification is the continuous degradation of land under the influence of natural and anthropological causes in arid, semi-arid and dry- sub humid conditions. Mostly, it is a slow and creeping process except for certain events like torrential periods leading to heavy soil erosion in short period of time, events of landslides, zoom cultivation leading to forest degradation etc etc. There exist no substantial base data on the status of desertification in India, as a whole. As such, to assess the status of desertification for entire country is a Herculean task and needs to be carried out using fast, accurate, cost effective and less efforting method like satellite remote-sensing. An attempt has been made to carry out Desertification Status Mapping (DSM) of entire India using multi-temporal IRS-Resourcesat AWiFS data on 1:500,000 scale. This has been accomplished by involving about 16 different institutions/ agencies in the country. The DSM output reveals the land use/ cover categories affected by various processes of degradation with varying severity.. The various processes of degradation observed includes water erosion, vegetal degradation, wind erosion, salinization/ alkalization, water logging, frost heaving, frost shattering, mass -wasting, man-made etc. The two main processes of degradation observed are vegetal degradation in forests and scrublands followed by water erosion in agriculture areas. This is a unique attempt to map both hot and cold regions in totality based on a comprehensive classification system developed for DSM through a pilot project in about 8 different test sites in the hot and cold regions of India at 1:50,000 scale. The study reveals that there exists about 104.94 m ha area under various processes and severity of desertification, which is nearly 31.92 %. This means that nearly one-third geographical area of the country is under desertification. The present paper deals with the description of the project, indicators used, classification system , methodology adopted, and the results achieved for the maiden inventory of India's status of desertification
