Search

Water and soil are two essential natural resources, which their preservation determines the local and national environmental sustainability. The pollution and erosion processes causing deterioration of these resources, which impacting negativaly the environment and economy development. This research aims to suggest the most straight forward and most appropriate control measures for the basins that are socially and economically acceptable for farmers. By consdering Argana basin as study area, the proposed approach consists, first, to analyze the soil loss map and, then, cconducted semi-structured interviews with local farmers at various locations across the basin. The results indicate that the areas of high and very high deterioration encompass 48 % of the basin’s surface. In addition, all of the farmers questioned used agroforestry on their managed sites. The study highlight the importtance of the traditional practices in fighting water erosion risk.

The Issen basin is a dry area affected by climate variability and desertification. It is located in high spot of Moroccan flora biodiversity that includes argan tree ecosystem as a part of the Western High Atlas (WHA). The objective of this work is to assess rainfall variability and erosivity as determining factors of soil erosion and vegetation cover degradation. The results reveal an arid to superior semi-arid climate where annual rainfall range from 200 mm in the centre of the Argana corridor, to 500 mm in the snow-covered northern foothills. The analysis of the 37 years of rainfall data indicate a coefficient of variation Cvis about67%. The erosivity index presents a high variability range from 34 to more than 81 MJ.mm/ha.h.yr in the wettest areas, indicating considerable soil erosion. In addition, the basin suffering from severe periods of drought due to the occurrence of the continuous decrease of the accumulated precipitation. Eventually, the rainfall variability and erosivity can affect ecosystem function and services (ecosystem degradation, water availability, etc).

The purpose of the present work is to assess desertification change in the Tarfaya basin (Morocco) based on quantifying sand dunes mass change at the corridor scale using two Panchromatic bands of Landsat ETM+ and OLI with 15 m of resolution covering the study area for ten years (2005–2016). In this work, the sand dunes quantification is qualitative and is based on automatic extraction and classification of sand dunes shape using co-occurence texture filters and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The statistical results show that the area covered by sand was increased during the last ten years, which reveal that desertification becomes more intense.

This study attempts to describe the physical characteristics of the Issen basin (western High Atlas of Morocco) in order to highlight the factors affecting water flow and volume that may increase water erosion risk. By using ALOS-DEM of moderate spatial resolution (12.5 m) and GIS platform, it was possible to provide a joint set of morphometric indices of the study area. The obtained results reveal that the relief of the study basin is of mountainous symptom indicating its maturity. The contrasting topography (625 m to 3528 m), with a specific unevenness of the order of 612 m, highlights a strong relief. 94% of the watershed area has a slope of over 3%. The mean elongation of the basin is 1.74, with a fairly long water concentration time of about 7.5 hours and an average drainage density of 0.85 km-1. The tectonics, lithology, and external geodynamics characterstics indicate a strongly contrasted morphology characterizing the Issen basin. Overall, these morphometric characteristics can increase the shallow water flows and sediments mobilized by the Issen Wadi, which can increase the soil loss and flooding risks in the basin [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global Land Cover (GLC) maps have been extensively used as background data for numerous applications such as land-use planning, climate change monitoring, and urban planning. While countries in Europe and North America have greatly developed land cover maps, several developing countries in Asia and Africa lack such vital data sources. GlobeLand30's 30 m resolution dataset has the potential to meet the mapping needs of these developing regions. However, differences in accuracy of the dataset between countries can be significant making it unsuitable to adopt regional accuracy directly for assessing individual country's accuracy level. Therefore, it is critical to develop reliable localized assessments. This research assesses the accuracy of GlobeLand30 for Malaysia using multiple evaluation approaches. Seven classes of land cover data were evaluated using 197 samples in the country. An overall accuracy of 63.45% and 65.70% was obtained from the Error Matrix using sample counts and the new unbiased area estimator respectively. We conclude that the overall accuracy of GlobeLand30 in tropical developing countries like Malaysia is generally lower than the accuracy in developed countries and arid developing countries thereby requiring significant improvement for optimal use. However, despite the errors due largely to misclassification, the GlobeLand 30 data has the potential to complement other LULC data to estimate and monitor vital land-use changes in Malaysia and the ASEAN region in general for sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study anticipated to understand sand encroachment evolution through analysis of sand contribution across space and time using remote sensing in Laâyoune-Tarfaya basin, Morocco, over the period from 1987 to 2011. The assessment based on supervised classifications of Landsat imagery orthorectified data, using Maximum Likelihood (ML), Minimum Distance (MD) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers. In order to ameliorate the information, principal components analysis (PCA) and co-occurrence measurement algorithm were used for choosing bands and data transformation. Images differencing was applied on image pairs derived from classification to analyze sand encroachment evolution. All classifiers present enhanced performances, and revealed that area covered by sand was increased by 7%, 4.66% and 4.59% for ML, MD and SVM, respectively. Consequently, images differencing results confirmed that sand material increasing arise not only from coastal area contribution but also mostly from erosion of complicated sand dunes exist in the middle part of the studied area. Evaluating of the presented phenomenon dimensions and its consequences are extremely important to increase the local authorities awareness and mainly for avoiding or minimizing the consequences of the future sand dunes threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]