Drylands, which occupy more than 40% of the Earth’s land surface, are highly susceptible to degradation. It is important to understand causes, mechanisms, and environmental consequences of dryland ecosystem degradation. Land use policies are known to play a critical role in driving land cover changes, as well as in mitigating land degradation and promoting sustainable development in drylands. W...

Newly reclaimed areas cover several patches over different regions of Egypt, which have different specific characteristics related to climate, soils, hydrology, etc... . The mechanical farm, which extends over 10,000 feddans fares from south of Alexandria by 62 Km, could be considered one of the most important reclaimed areas at West of Nubaria affected by degradation due to water logging. The ...

Land use change may influence many natural phenomena and ecological processes, including runoff, soil erosion, sedimentation and soil conditions. Decreasing of forest area in the North of Iran is one of the critical problems in recent years. The aims of this study are to detect land use changes between 1967 to 2002 using satellite images of Land Sat 7 ETM+ (2002), aerial photos and digital topo...

Dust events of Iran mainly originate from Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and inland territories which are influenced by droughts and Land Use/Land Cover (LU/LC) degradation in regional scale. The aim of this research was to investigate the impact of Regional Vegetation Cover Degradation (RVCD), particularly Regional Rangeland Cover Degradation (RRCD) on frequency of dusty days in western pro...

YiJinHuoLuo Banner is a county of Inner Mongolia with obvious semiarid monsoon climate. Because of unsuitable land use, such as cultivating marginal land and over pasture, desertification was getting severer and severer before 1974. Since 1974, People have been doing their best to grow woods, shrubs and grasses for increasing the coverage of vegetation. People have taken suitable and available ...

Landsat TM and ETM+ images were used to examine urban growth for the Greater Cairo area, Egypt, between 1986 and 1999, assisted by fieldwork and high spatial resolution images such as IRS, CORONA, and IKONOS. During the study period, urban land (collectively classified as built-up surface) increased significantly. Most of the increases in urban land came from the conversion of desert land and f...