Monitoring land degradation with long-term satellite data

Abstract

In South Africa, land degradation in rangelands has been regarded as a major environmental problem for many years. During the last ten years, attention focussed on the land degradation in the former homelands, now communal lands. There is an urgent need for a standardised, quantitative and spatially-explicit measures of ecosystem functions to map and monitor land degradation, especially in the light of land redistribution and restitution. The authors investigated the long-term vegetation production of these degraded areas with 18 years of satellite data which provided an objective and repeatable, regional monitoring tool.