Integrative geospatial approaches for the comprehensive monitoring and assessment of land management sustainability: Rationale, Potentials, and Characteristics

Abstract

Sustainable dryland management seeks to improve the conditions of people and ecosystems affected by degradation, but it is often unclear which land management strategies work, which ones do not and why. Monitoring and assessment (M&A) can support decision-making by providing this information. As implied by the 10-year Strategy of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), however, M&A efforts have thus far been insufficient or inadequate. We argue that integrative geospatial approaches should be implemented to enhance dryland management decision-making. By assimilating and linking human and environmental data, qualitative and quantitative data, as well as field and remotely sensed data in a spatially explicit framework, such approaches facilitate assessments of both the complexities and place-specificities inherent to sustainability. In addition, they help represent different stakeholder perspectives, promote communication among scientists from diverse backgrounds as well as between scientific and local experts, facilitate inter-institutional knowledge sharing, and create synergy between the UNCCD and other Conventions. Due to these benefits as well as the rapid evolution and increasing availability and affordability of geospatial data and technologies in all countries, it is appropriate to begin capitalizing more fully on them now for the M&A of land management sustainability. In order for integrative geospatial approaches to become more central to M&A efforts, however, capacities and infrastructure must be improved and standards and protocols developed for the collection, analysis, and modeling of data, for the evaluation of outputs, and for the reporting of results.

An Exploration of Scenarios to Support Sustainable Land Management Using Integrated Environmental Socio-economic Models

“…Assessing multi-faceted biophysical effects might also require more sophisticated ecological field assessment methods (e.g. Rubio and Bochet 1998;Kosmas et al 2000), combined with comprehensive geospatial assessment (Buenemann et al 2011) to support model development and conservation planning. As the gridbased assessment on a 1 ha-basis essentially mimics the field scale, with no interaction between cells, a financial assessment was deemed particularly appropriate.…”

The role of Remote Sensing in land degradation assessments: opportunities and challenges

“…The listed processes at one specific scale may also occur at other scales. Sub-scales could be identified for each mentioned scale (re-drawn and modified after Buenemann et al, 2011).…”

“…• analyses of driving factors of LD (Dubovyk, Landmann, Dietz, & Menz, 2016a;Li, Ma, Xu, Wang, & Zhang, 2009b;Mirzabaev et al, 2016;Zhou et al, 2015); • spatial decision support of land rehabilitation activities (Buenemann et al, 2011;Dubovyk et al, 2013b;Thomas, Quillerou, & Stewart, 2013;Vlek et al, 2008); • spatial assessments of the impacts of either LD or land rehabilitation activities (Bai & Dent, 2009;CACILM, 2006;Cano, Mermut, Arocena, & Silla, 2009;Liu et al, in press). To date, several spatial assessments have been conducted to map LD globally.…”

Inter-annual and seasonal trends of vegetation condition in the Upper Blue Nile (Abay) Basin: dual-scale time series analysis

“…Recent interest in vegetation trend analysis arises for three reasons. First, there is considerable interest in monitoring and assessing the state and trend of land degradation as well as in monitoring the performance of management programmes (Buenemann et al, 2011;Vogt et al, 2011). Second, it is only recently that substantial amounts of remotely sensed data and robust geospatial approaches suitable to such analysis have become available (Bai et al, 2008;Buenemann et al, 2011;.…”

“…First, there is considerable interest in monitoring and assessing the state and trend of land degradation as well as in monitoring the performance of management programmes (Buenemann et al, 2011;Vogt et al, 2011). Second, it is only recently that substantial amounts of remotely sensed data and robust geospatial approaches suitable to such analysis have become available (Bai et al, 2008;Buenemann et al, 2011;. Third, it is a natural first step towards identifying drivers of changes in terrestrial ecosystems as vegetation variability and trends affect the exchange of water, energy, nutrients and carbon between the biosphere, the geosphere and the atmosphere (Baldocchi et al, 2001).…”