Long term monitoring and assessment of desertification processes using medium & high resolution satellite data

Desertification is one of the major environmental problems, affecting the living conditions of millions of people all across the world. Inventory and monitoring of the desertification status are the primary requirement in preparation of mitigation plans to combat desertification. The objective of the present paper is, therefore, to prepare spatial inventory of desertification status that provides information on the spatial extent of the area under desertification, its type and severity. Multi-season Landsat data of 30 m spatial resolution, pertaining to the years 1991, 2000 and 2016, have been analysed to prepare desertification status map (DSM) at 1: 25,000 scale for Jaitran Taluka, Pali district, Rajasthan state in western India. Monitoring and assessment of desertification has been carried out for a period of 25 years. Area under desertification in the Jaitran taluka has increased from 13080.22 ha to 15376.37 ha during the past 25 years. Preparation of desertification combating plans, which can be implemented in the field, requires DSM at cadastral scale. Therefore, DSM were also prepared on 1: 10,000 scale using very high spatial resolution data of Resourecesat-2 LISS-IV. Spatial information on land use, desertification status (extent, type and severity) extracted from the above DSM and the information on topography and morphology, inferred from Cartosat-1 images (2.5-m spatial resolution, panchromatic stereo) were used to suggest local specific actions for combating desertification.