Main Product 1 (MP1) : DeSurvey Monitoring Product

Authors:

Joachim Hill, Marion Stellmes (Trier University), Gabriel del Bario (EEZA-CSIC), Marieta Sanjuan (EEZA-CSIC) marieta@eeza.csic.es, Alberto Ruiz (EEZA-CSIC) aruiz@eeza.csic.es

DeSurvey Monitoring Product (MP1) will provide an exhaustive assessment of desertification affected areas and their development over time. Target end users are technical departments of public administrations dealing with soil conservation, land condition and the performance of vegetation, including agriculture.

MP1 is designed to integrate developments from DeSurvey aiming at providing spatial information required for assessing and monitoring desertification processes. The major information sources used by the participants to the DeSurvey geomatics consortium are remote sensing systems which operate on different spatial scales and provide access to global archives of historical data  back to 1980-1985, i.e. for approximately 25 years.

The MP1 modules address several spatial scale levels, ranging from coarse spatial resolution systems (1 km - 250 m grid size) down to medium (10-30 m grid size) and very high (~ 0.5 - 4 m grid size) resolution.

The major objective is to provide tools for assessing the condition of land surfaces with regard to degradation processes that affect the bio-physical functioning and feedback-mechanisms between vegetation and soil resources as well as related land use effects.

The resulting information should be standardised such that the assessment can be repeated at time steps which are compliant to the nature of slow (i.e., multi-annual) degradation processes, and thus could be used for identifying initial indicators of disturbance (early warning) and for monitoring progressive desertification as well as evaluating the performance of mitigation programmes.

In addition, some of the modules use spatial data from various sources (gridded climate data archives, digital elevation data, and digital soil maps) which can be integrated with the remote sensing products for optimising land condition assessment concepts as described in the project proposal.

Since the bio-physical attributes of land surface changes in areas affected by desertification processes are almost in all known cases a direct consequence of socio-economic drivers (against a background of specific climatic conditions) the Monitoring Product is conceptualised with two core components.

 

1. Regional mapping of bio-physical land condition derived through the integrated evaluation of vegetation productivity against regionalised climate variables,
2. Regional to local scale mapping of complex desertification syndromes which combine land use change and bio-physical characteristics over time with a conceptual framework for connecting socioeconomic drivers and their impact on the human-environment system.

The procedures are designed for low cost, replicable, multi-scale applications from local to national scale. Input data consist of time series of vegetation abundance and climate. The former are indexes of green biomass based on EOS imagery. The latter are climatic surfaces interpolated from point data in meteorological stations.

Both components of the Monitoring Product have reached a considerable level of maturity and were already presented at international science meetings (e.g.,Wengen Workshop on Global Change Research: Edition 2007 - Climate Change and Desertification: Monitoring, Modelling and Forecasting, Wengen (Switzerland), 10-13 September 2007.

The scientific and technical development of MP1 has been achieved within the three first years of the project. The core algorithms, benchmark databases and prototypic functions are described in the project deliverables associated to the respective core components (available on the DeSurvey website www.desurvey.net ).

 

The Iberian Peninsule was selected as a benchmark study area for the development of some important aspects.

Combining the different time series parameters (trends, phase shifts and changes in the magnitude of phenological cycles) allows to map spatial patterns of desertification-related land use change syndromes, such as the „Rural Exodus“ (here displayed for the Iberian Peninsula). Hill et al. (2008).

 

Conclusion and prospects

The Desurvey Monitoring Product (MP1) can be realistically classified at the moment as a data product. This is because users can be provided with results in the format of data layers and reports outlining the desertification features of a study area, in terms of the core components.

However, the suite of software tools required to generate these results is so far intended to facilitate the component application by the respective scientific team. This is a normal stage in the evolution of a complex product where both the formalization of the problem and its technical solution have been recently
developed using a few target areas as a benchmark.

The short term plan involves applying the MP1 to as many DeSurvey sites as possible within the Training and Demonstration activities of the last two years of the project. This will make possible to test the robustness of the scientific approaches with respect to different environmental layouts.

Demonstration will aim at a fine tuning of the MP1 outcome to the needs and interests of end users. Training, on the other hand, will aim at developing a logical sequence of steps to facilitate the MP1 application by operators.

A fully furnished version of MP1, including a generalized protocol for data preparation and processing, and keys for the interpretation of results, will be prepared at the end of DeSurvey.