Many elements determine land sensitivity to desertification, whose analysis requires multifactorial approaches to be used. The environmental sensitive areas methodology is a well-known approach to estimate sensitivity to desertification that accounts for multiple interacting driving forces, conceived and validated in a Mediterranean environment. We show that the environmental sensitive areas methodology can be used, with minor modifications, in a tropical context, where it allows the discrimination among environments with different degree of susceptibility to degradation and resilience. The results obtained for the Dominican Republic show that 48·4% of its territory is critically sensitive to desertification, and 16·4% of it is highly critically sensitive to desertification, mostly because of intense and inadequate land use practices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.