During the 20th century, purely climate climatic factors were rarely responsible for desertification in the Mediterranean region, because droughts are relatively short-lived. Present land degradation in Northern Mediterranean countries is partially due to dramatic land use changes that occurred during the second half of this century and which in many cases lead to an unstable state of ecosystem...

Coverage rates of vegetation and exposed bedrock are two key indicators of karst rocky desertification. In this study, the abundances of vegetation and exposed rock were retrieved from a hyperspectral Hyperion image using linear spectral unmixing method. The results were verified using the spectral indices of karst rocky desertification (KRDSI) and an integrated LAI spectral index: modified chl...

Dry Land Asia is the largest arid and semi-arid region in the northern hemisphere that suffers from land desertification. Over the period 1982–2011, there were both overall improvement and regional degeneration in the vegetation NDVI. We analyze future climate changes in these area using two ensemble-average methods from CMIP5 data. Bayesian Model Averaging shows a better capability to represen...

This paper undertakes a direct, comprehensive assessment of the long-term sustainability of desertification rehabilitation in China under a plausible but worst case scenario where governmental interventions, in the form of payments for environmental services (PES), will cease. The analysis is based on household behavior as well as experimental data. Our econometric results highlight the main ob...

Sandy desertification is one of the most severe ecological problems in the world. Essentially, it is land degradation caused by discordance in the Social-Ecological Systems (SES). The ability to coordinate SES is a principal characteristic of regional sustainable development and a key factor in desertification control. This paper directly and comprehensively evaluates the ability to coordinate ...

An approach to derive relationships for defining land degradation and desertification risk and developing appropriate tools for assessing the effectiveness of the various land management practices using indicators is presented in the present paper. In order to investigate which indicators are most effective in assessing the level of desertification risk, a total of 70 candidate indicators was s...

This document presents proposals for the design and implementation of a Baseline Survey for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). It has been prepared at the request of the Secretariat of the UNCCD. The Baseline Survey is to be initiated as part of the UNCCD's Ten Year Strategic Plan, and will form the starting point for monitoring long-term trends in desertification so that prog...