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Desertification in western Rajasthan (India): an assessment using remote sensing derived rain-use efficiency and residual trend methods

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Abstract

Owing to its impact on global ecosystem, climate change and related effects is being perceived as a serious issue worldwide especially in the arid and semi-arid regions. Climatic variability has been considered as a major cause for degradation of natural resources. Desertification caused by climatic or human-induced processes negatively affects the productivity of land within an ecosystem. It is noteworthy that depletion of vegetation cover plays a key role in land degradation; in fact reduction in plants and perennial cover is regarded as an indicator of the onset of desertification. Temporal analysis of satellite-based NDVI is one of the major remote sensing tools which can identify the depletion of vegetation cover. In the present study, rain-use efficiency (RUE) method has been used for monitoring vegetation degradation and, substantially, the process of desertification in western Rajasthan. RUE, the ratio between normalized growing season NDVI and rainfall, has been calculated for individual years (1983–2013). A correlation analysis was carried out by considering yearly RUE as dependent variable and time (years) as the independent variable. It shows that regression slope of RUE mainly depends upon the dynamic condition of integrated NDVI and rainfall. In order to monitor the areas under human-induced desertification, the residual trend method has been adopted. The correlation between rainfall and NDVI was found significant (p < 0.05) except some portion in the middle east. The study reveals that about 35% of the total area has experienced high human-induced desertification process.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the NOAA and SPOT for providing the satellite based vegetation products required for successful completion of the study. In addition, we are indebted to IMD and TRMM for rainfall datasets used in this study. We also acknowledge to Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (Indian Space Research Organization), Dehradun, India, and Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands, for providing necessary facilities during the research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Soil, Water, Land Engineering and Management, Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Arnab Kundu

  2. Centre of Atmosphere, Ocean and Space Studies, University of Allahabad, Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Arnab Kundu

  3. Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Indian Space Research Organisation, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

    N. R. Patel

  4. Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

    S. K. Saha

  5. Department of Remote Sensing and GIS, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India

    Dipanwita Dutta

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  1. Arnab Kundu
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Correspondence to Dipanwita Dutta.

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Kundu, A., Patel, N.R., Saha, S.K. et al. Desertification in western Rajasthan (India): an assessment using remote sensing derived rain-use efficiency and residual trend methods. Nat Hazards 86, 297–313 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-016-2689-y

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