SAT: A Software for Assessing the Risk of Desertification in Spain

Abstract

Desertification is a major global environmental issue exacerbated by climate change. Strategies to combat desertification include prevention which seeks to reverse the process before the system reaches the stable desertified state. One of these initiatives is to implement early warning tools. This paper presents SAT (the Spanish acronym for Early Warning System), a decision support system (DSS), for assessing the risk of desertification in Spain, where 20% of the land has already been desertified and 1% is in active degradation. SAT relies on three versions of a Generic Desertification Model (GDM) that integrates economics and ecology under the predator-prey paradigm. The models have been programmed using Vensim, a type of software used to build and simulate System Dynamics (SD) models. Through Visual Basic programming, these models are operated from the Excel environment. In addition to the basic simulation exercises, specially designed tools have been coupled to assess the risk of desertification and determine the ranking of the most influential factors of the process. The users targeted by SAT are government land-use planners as well as desertification experts. SAT tool is implemented for five case studies, each one of them representing a desertification syndrome identified in Spain. Given the general nature of the tool and the fact that all United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) signatory countries are committed to developing their National Plans to Combat Desertification (NPCD), SAT could be exported to regions threatened by desertification and expanded to cover more case studies.

Identifying social–ecological gaps to promote biocrust conservation actions

“…For instance, a study focused on the implications of climate change (direct driver of change component) in biocrust composition (nature component) implied one association with "linkage number 3". In doing so, we used a binary scale (0, not associated; 1, associated) according to Mastrángelo et al (2019). We established as criteria that the scientific knowledge contained in a single article should imply more than one association with the IPBES elements.…”

“…However, it is widely recognized that there are barriers between science and governance decisionmaking that hinder translation of the scientific evidence to conservation actions (Ellison, 2016). In an attempt to address this conservation challenge, there are certain voices within the international research community that encourage adopting new research framings focused on producing knowledge able to properly inform policy actions and management practices (Mastrángelo et al, 2019). Within the multiple conservation framings in use today (Mace, 2014), literature increasingly recognizes the social-ecological approach as an adequate scientific means to achieve it (Ban et al, 2013;Díaz et al, 2015;Mastrángelo et al, 2019).…”

“…In an attempt to address this conservation challenge, there are certain voices within the international research community that encourage adopting new research framings focused on producing knowledge able to properly inform policy actions and management practices (Mastrángelo et al, 2019). Within the multiple conservation framings in use today (Mace, 2014), literature increasingly recognizes the social-ecological approach as an adequate scientific means to achieve it (Ban et al, 2013;Díaz et al, 2015;Mastrángelo et al, 2019). The social-ecological approach is based on the paradigm of "people and nature" and emphasizes the importance of institutions and social structures for transitioning towards sustainable interactions between human societies and the natural environment (Mace, 2014).…”

“…In order to instigate the project, we selected Spain as a pilot area. Given the extent (about 75 % of the national territory; Martínez-Valderrama et al, 2020) and the whole range of favourable environmental conditions for biocrusts, Spanish drylands are characterized by a great diversity of biocrust-forming organisms that play a crucial role in many ecosystem processes and represent an excellent field laboratory to work with biocrusts (Maestre et al, 2011). Indeed, Spain has become one of the world's biggest spots for biocrust studies (Rodriguez-Caballero et al, 2018a), as reflected in the increasing trend of research groups doing biocrust research over the past decades (Maestre et al, 2011).…”

Scientific Programming Tools for Water Management

“…e paper "SAT: A Software for Assessing the Risk of Desertification in Spain" [5] presents SAT, a decision support system for assessing the risk of desertification in Spain. SAT relies on three versions of a generic desertification model that integrates economics and ecology under the predator-prey paradigm.…”