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Desertification risk assessment maps |
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Source: extracted from Karavitis, C., Kosmas, C. et al. (submitted article) An expert system towards assessing desertification risk using indicators. Environmental Management
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The main desertification process in the Yan River Basin study site is tillage practice, which results in significant downslope movement of soil and also increases water erosion. For this process, the Desertification Risk Assessment Tool needed data to calculate 190 indicators in 19 map units. Using data from the WOCAT QM database, the required indicators were estimated and imported to the Assessment Tool.
The procedure was applied to all the map units in the study site and the DRI values calculated are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Desertification risk calculation per map unit
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The DRI values were mapped for each of the 19 polygons (Map 1)
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| Map 1: Desertification risk index (DRI) |
Map 2: Degree of land degradation (as assessed using the WOCAT mapping method) |
The DRI map was compared with the WOCAT QM of the same area (Map 2). It can be seen that the rate of degradation and the measures' effectiveness seen in the WOCAT map correspond closely to the DRI values, with the highest rate of degradation and the lowest measures effectiveness matching up to the highest values of DRI.
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