Desertification and Land Degradation Status Mapping in Maharashtra and Goa State

Land degradation, in general, implies temporary or permanent recession from a higher to a lower status of productivity through deterioration of physical, chemical and biological aspects. The information on land degradation is needed for a variety of purposes like planning reclamation programs, rational land use planning, bringing additional areas into cultivation and to improve productivity levels in degraded lands. It has both environmental and economic consequences. The land degradation problem has reached alarming propositions due to various factors like over exploitation and mismanagement of natural resources and basic socio- economic factors like land shortage, inappropriate land use, severe economic pressures on farmers, poverty and population growth. The land degradation is an age-old problem, which is continuing in the present generation and continues in future also.

Though conventional soil surveys provide information on land degradation; they are slow, time consuming and expensive. Among the new technologies emerged for studying natural resources, space borne remote sensing technology proved to be powerful, because of synoptic view of the terrain features, repetitive coverage of the same area at regular time intervals, collection of data in visible through near infra-red, thermal to microwave regions and amenability of data to computers for quick analysis. Remotely sensed data from satellites are being operationally used to derive information on degraded lands and monitor them periodically in time and space domain using multi temporal data.