Land degradation and desertification are amongst the most severe threats to human welfare and the environment, as they affect the livelihoods of some 2 billion people in the worlds drylands, and they are directly connected to pressing global environmental problems, such as the loss of biological diversity or global climate change. Strategies to co

As the world’s population continues to expand, maintaining and indeed increasing agricultural productivity is more important than ever, though it is also more difficult than ever in the face of changing weather patterns that in some cases are leading to aridity and desertification. The absence of scientific soil inventories, especially in arid areas, leads to mistaken decisions about soil use that, in the end, reduce a region’s capacity to feed its population, or to guarantee a clean water supply. Greater efficiency in soil use is possible when these resources are properly classified using international standards. Focusing on arid regions, this volume details soil classification from many countries. It is only once this information is properly assimilated by policymakers it becomes a foundation for informed decisions in land use planning for rational and sustainable uses.

A volume in the three-volume Remote Sensing Handbook series, Remote Sensing of Water Resources, Disasters, and Urban Studies documents the scientific and methodological advances that have taken place during the last 50 years. The other two volumes in the series are Remotely Sensed Data Characterization, Classification, and Accuracies, and Land Reso

The question in the title of this book draws attention to the shortcomings of a concept that has become a political tool of global importance even as the scientific basis for its use grows weaker. The concept of desertification, it can be argued, has ceased to be analytically useful and distorts our understanding of social-environmental systems and their resiliency, particularly in poor countries with variable rainfall and persistent poverty. For better policy and governance, we need to reconsider the scientific justification for international attempts to combat desertification. Our exploration of these issues begins in the Sahel of West Africa, where a series of severe droughts at the end of the 20th century led to the global institutionalization of the idea of desertification. It now seems incontrovertible that these droughts were not caused primarily by local land use mismanagement, effectively terminating a long-standing policy and scientific debate. There is now an opportunity to treat this episode as an object lesson in the relationship between science, the formation of public opinion and international policy-making. Looking beyond the Sahel, the chapters in this book provide case studies from around the world that examine the use and relevance of the desertification concept. Despite an increasingly sophisticated understanding of dryland environments and societies, the uses now being made of the desertification concept in parts of Asia exhibit many of the shortcomings of earlier work done in Africa. It took scientists more than three decades to transform a perceived desertification crisis in the Sahel into a non-event. This book is an effort to critically examine that experience and accelerate the learning process in other parts of the world.

This book is the most comprehensive documentation of the scientific and methodological advances that have taken place in understanding remote sensing data, methods, and applications over last 50 years. In a very practical way it demonstrates the experience, utility, methods and models used in studying a wide array of water applications. There are more than 100 leading global experts in the field contributing to this work.

The Fifth International Symposium on Recent Advances in Quantitative Remote Sensing was held in Torrent, Spain from 18 to 22 September 2018. It was sponsored and organized by the Global Change Unit (GCU) from the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL), University of Valencia (UVEG), Spain. This Symposium addressed the scientific advances in quantitative remote sensing in connection with real applications. Its main goal was to assess the state of the art of both theory and applications in the analysis of remote sensing data, as well as to provide a forum for researcher in this subject area to exchange views and report their latest results. In this book 89 of the 262 contributions presented in both plenary and poster sessions are arranged according to the scientific topics selected. The papers are ranked in the same order as the final programme.

Soil Mapping and Process Modeling for Sustainable Land Use Management is the first reference to address the use of soil mapping and modeling for sustainability from both a theoretical and practical perspective. The use of more powerful statistical techniques are increasing the accuracy of maps and reducing error estimation, and this text provides the information necessary to utilize the latest techniques, as well as their importance for land use planning. Providing practical examples to help illustrate the application of soil process modeling and maps, this reference is an essential tool for professionals and students in soil science and land management who want to bridge the gap between soil modeling and sustainable land use planning. Offers both a theoretical and practical approach to soil mapping and its uses in land use management for sustainability Synthesizes the most up-to-date research on soil mapping techniques and applications Provides an interdisciplinary approach from experts worldwide working in soil mapping and land management