DESURVEY - A Surveillance System for Assessing and Monitoring Desertification

School of Geography, University of Leeds

Principal Investigators:

Dr Pippa Chapman
Prof Mike Kirkby

Dates:

March 2005 - March 2010

Grant:

EC

Summary:

Project Website: www.desurvey.net

Commissioned by the EC in March 2005 with funding of 7.8 million euros over 5 years, the DESURVEY project will deliver a compact set of integrated procedures for the surveillance and assessment of desertification status and land -use system vulnerability from regional to international scales. These procedures will be delivered through a suite of computer-based tools, the DESURVEY system, tailored to the information needs of organisations involved in desertification policy and management. Each tool will address a different aspect of desertification (climatic drivers, socioeconomic drivers, land -use and land condition change, water resources and hydrology) and be linked through a common DESURVEY database, metadata catalogue, and information system. The system will be developed and applied within the EU, accompanied by tutorial material and an end-user workshop. To fulfil these ambitions a core of leading edge European basic and applied desertification research have been assembled and integrated with international expertise in user-support technology development, data provision, education and capacity building, and stakeholder engagement to form the DESURVEY Consortium. The consortium is composed of 39 Organisations including universities, government research agencies and SMEs from 10 EU Member States and 6 Third Country States. As such DESURVEY constitutes the largest ever international research project to exclusively focus on regional desertification surveillance and assessment.

Role of School of Geography in DeSurvey

The School is the partner responsible for the module on “Ground-based land condition assessment and forecasting”, involving Mike Kirkby, Pippa Chapman and Brian Irvine over the 5-year life of the project, and is particularly involved with the coarse scale modelling, building on ongoing and recent work in the PESERA, DesertLinks and tempQsim EC projects. Land cover is the most important parameter which links models, ground based assessments and interpretations based on remote sensing. The objective of this module are:

  1. to develop, test and implement a methodology which brings models and field assessments of cover into forms which can be directly compared with vegetation images derived from remote sensing at both coarse and fine scales
  2. to compare model forecasts with historic and ongoing time series for vegetation derived from remote sensing, to calibrate and validate model response to climate, land use and other drivers, and to provide a proven capability to forecast responses to alternative global change and policy scenarios
  3. to use the models to associate observable vegetation states with active desertification processes, and so quantify the use of changing vegetation cover to give prior warning of physical degradation processes, including soil erosion by water or wind , salinisation and loss of soil organic matter
  4. to make direct cross-comparisons between fine (10 - 100m resolution) and coarse (250m 5km resolution) models to ensure that their respective conceptual bases are compatible and that differences in forecasts are resolved, both empirically and theoretically, to improve the convergence between different scale approaches

The module aims to provide assessments of land condition and its response to historic and scenario changes in climate and land use. Priority will be given to the direct forecasting of variables which can be derived from remote sensing, and to maximising the compatibility of processes and forecasts between coarse and fine scale models to improve convergence of forecasts over the range of scales of interest. Therefore, the Module will focus primarily on vegetation and land cover variables and indicators. The concept of land degradation is taken in a holistic sense that integrates individual processes, such as soil erosion, soil salinisation, soil crusting & soil compaction, changes in soil water and organic matter storage capacity. Assessments will be based on independently validated existing models for water balance, vegetation and soil degradation at both regional and local scales.

Mission and objectives

Desertification surveillance is required for making one-off and periodic assessments of desertification status, for forecasting possible trajectories (early warning), and for evaluating the performance of management programmes. However, assessment procedures have so far been largely empirical and focused on the symptoms of desertification (land degradation) rather than on the underlying human -environment interactions and processes. As a consequence most of the available approaches are impractical to use at regional or global scales for reasons of cost; cannot address critical human-environment driver and process synergies and dynamics, and; only provide limited possibilities for quantifying uncertainty. DESURVEY will fill these gaps by developing a prototype of a low cost and flexible surveillance system (the DESURVEY system) to facilitate:

  1. Understanding of desertification in a systemic and dynamic manner;
  2. Monitoring and assessment of desertification and land degradation status over large areas using objective and reproducible methods, including diagnosis of driving forces;
  3. Discriminating between current and inherited desertification, and the identifying of desertification hot spots;
  4. Forecasting of desertification under selected climatic and socio-economic scenarios;
  5. Bridging the gap between scientific knowledge generated by the project on the processes underlying desertification and the practice of formulating policy and management action to detect, prevent and resolve desertification risks.

To resolve these issues DESURVEY will utilise an integrated perspective of the desertification process (shown below). Two complementary approaches will be adopted:

  1. Spatially explicit cellular modelling of climate and socio-economic forcing impacts on land condition and land claims in land use systems. A feedback loop between land condition and land use spatial allocation will enable dynamic time projections.
  2. Predator-prey based systems modelling of Land Use Systems Vulnerability.
  3. Modelling work will be supported by independent databases provided by coupled remote sensing and ground information, together with socio-economic data.

The DESURVEY System will be designed to run at three spatial resolution levels:

  1. Coarse resolutions (~ 8 km or province-NUT equivalents) for preliminary surveys at the regional scale;
  2. standard resolutions (~ 1 km) for regional applications, and;
  3. fine resolutions (~ 30 m) for local applications.

Further, the system will be designed to meet the information needs of international, national and regional environmental and agricultural authorities, such as the European Union (EU), UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and local consortia of stakeholders in risk-affected districts. Target areas of moderate size (~ 1000 - 5000km2) will be selected and used for three purposes:

  1. development and parameterisation of models that evaluate land use and land degradation changes as well as vulnerability of land use systems to desertification;
  2. validation of the DESURVEY surveillance and assessment procedures,
  3. demonstration of the DESURVEY System’s performance.

Activities

The DESURVEY project is composed of 10 Modules each containing a number of Workpackages:

In addition DESURVEY will provide a range of training and demonstration activities.

Outputs

The main outputs of the project will be:

  1. DESURVEY Desertification Surveillance system tailored to end-user information needs.
  2. Application examples of desertification assessment and its performance at national scales in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece.
  3. Application examples of desertification assessment and its performance at the sub-national scales in 5 European areas and in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, China and Chile.
  4. Algorithms for deriving system-based indicators of discontinuities and breakpoints in the expected trajectories of threatened areas.
  5. Databases and information systems to run DESURVEY in the afore –mentioned areas.
  6. Two courses for increasing capacity of postgraduate specialists in desertification surveillance and training them in DESURVEY implementation and use.

Contact

For further information contact the DESURVEY Project Co-ordinator: Prof. Juan Puigdefabregas, Estacion Experimental de Zonas Aridas (EEZA-CSIC) General Segura 1, 04001 Almeria, Spain Tel +34 950 281045: email puigdefa@eeza.csic.es

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