An Assessment of Land Degradation in the Northern Province From Satellite Remote Sensing and Community Perception

Assessing the effects of human-induced land degradation in the former homelands of northern South Africa with a 1 km AVHRR NDVI time-series

“…Therefore, there is an urgent need for a reliable national monitoring procedure. There have been isolated efforts to map land degradation for specific study areas in SA with Landsat TM (Botha & Fouche, 2000;Kiguli et al, 1999;Tanser & Palmer, 1999). Provincial-scale natural resource audits based on Landsat TM mapping of vegetation cover, field surveys of plant species composition and soil erosion assessments in SA (e.g., Wessels et al, 2000) and elsewhere (e.g., Karfs et al, 2000;Pickup & Smith, 1993; have proven to be slow, costly and not sufficiently repeatable for timely national-scale monitoring.…”

“…200,000 km 2 ) was chosen because it includes many of the most extensively degraded areas according to NLC and NRLC ( Fig. 1; Botha & Fouche, 2000;Hoffman & Ashwell, 2001). Land use in this region includes commercial and subsistence cultivation, exotic forestry plantations, national parks (e.g., Kruger National Park), private game reserves, commercial cattle ranching and communal grazing.…”

Can human-induced land degradation be distinguished from the effects of rainfall variability? A case study in South Africa

“…1b). The region includes extensive degraded rangelands in the former homelands and current communal lands (Botha and Fouche, 2000;Hoffman and Ashwell, 2001). The NLC (Fairbanks et al, 2000) was used to map degraded and non-degraded rangelands (Fig.…”

Determination of land degradation causes in Tongyu County, Northeast China via land cover change detection

“…Mapping and monitoring of the evolution of mininginduced land degradation relies on digital analysis of time-series Landsat TM images (Almeida-Filho and Shimabukuro, 2002). Analysis of time-series vegetation index maps derived from Landsat MSS data revealed land degradation in the Northern Province of South Africa (Botha and Fouche, 2000). Chen and Rao (2008) determined the rate and status of grassland degradation in Northeast China from multitemporal Landsat TM/ETM data after the satellite data were converted into land cover maps using the decision tree method.…”