Remote sensing and GIS techniques for land degradation monitoring and assessment in Niger

摘要

This work presents the results of the PEICRE project, which monitors desertification in Niger. A previous project (PIK), carried out various interventions between 1984 and 1996, in the region of the Keita village in Niger, in order to reduce the effects of the desertification and land degradation processes. The CeSIA Institute evaluated whether the field interventions achieved the expected results. A Landsat Thematic Mapper image of 1984 and a Spot Multispectral image of 1995, were used to comparethe two different types of vegetation coverage. A second aspect of the developed work concerned the erosion analysis, using GIS techniques and multisource data integration models. Particularly, satellite, meteorological and terrain data were fused to estimate the potential crosion in the studied area in relation to different years. Accordingly, both the image processing and spectral classification procedures and the developed hydrological models will be described. The models were applied to data collected both before and after the project development and the results will be discussed in this paper, considering the effects of the project in the land degradation processes.