Land degradation severity assessment with sand encroachment in an ecologically fragile arid environment: a geospatial perspective

The objective of this study is to evaluate sand encroached degradation in arid-land, with a predominantly agricultural ecosystem, using geospatial technologies. The study primarily involves the assessment of land degradation severity, severity change dynamics and temporal land-use change patterns, such as growth or shrinkage. Land use/land cover (LULC) change dynamics were analyzed for eight featured classes, derived using a K-means supervised classification method. Overall accuracy and kappa statistics obtained were 91.68% and 0.904 for the year 2001, while 90.85% and 0.896 for year the 2006. The analysis revealed that change dynamic patterns were highest for sand-affected areas and built-up classes, showing positive trend and an overall change of 8.92% and 5.34%, respectively. Degradation severity change dynamics and change patterns clearly showed an increasing trend in highly severe degradation areas (dynamic change 5.55 km 2 /change pattern 0.093%), followed by severe degradation (dynamic change 31.22 km 2 /change pattern 0.52%). However, the maximum change was observed in moderately severe zones.