Land Use/Land Cover Change Analysis and Its Impact on Soil Properties in the Northern Part of Gadarif Region, Sudan

Abstract

Several decades of intensive dry land farming in the Gadarif region, located in the Eastern part of Sudan, has led to rapid land use/land cover (LULC) changes mainly due to agricultural expansion, government policies and environmental calamities such as drought. In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyse and monitor the LULC changes using multi‐temporal Landsat data for the years 1979, 1989 and 1999 and ASTER data for the year 2009. In addition, efforts were made to discuss the impact of LULC changes on the selected soil properties. For this, a post‐classification comparison technique was used to detect LULC changes from satellite images. Primarily, three main LULC types were selected to investigate the properties of soil, namely, cultivated land, fallow land and woodland. Moreover, soil samples were also collected at two depths of surface soil from ten sample plots for each of the LULC type. For these soil samples, various soil properties such as texture, bulk density, organic matter, soil pH, electrical conductivity, sodium adsorption ratio, phosphorous and potassium were analysed. The results showed that a significant and extensive change of LULC patterns has occurred in the last three decades in the study area. Further, laboratory tests revealed that soil properties were significantly affected by these LULC changes. The change of the physical and chemical properties of the soil may have attributed to the changes in the LULC resulting in land degradation, which in turn has led to a decline in soil productivity. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Effects of Chicken Manure on Growth and Yield of Jute Mallow (Corchorus olitorius L.) under Rain-Fed Conditions of Sudan

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“…Cracks can be 3 to 10 cm wide and can be as deep as 2 m during the dry season. Cation exchange capacity ranges from 50 to 100 mg 100 g −1 with calcium constituting more than half of the exchangeable cations [24]. Soil pH is near neutrality in general with 1 to 3 per cent free carbonates.…”

Assessment of Land-Cover/Land-Use Change and Landscape Patterns in the Two National Nature Reserves of Ebinur Lake Watershed, Xinjiang, China

“…In this study, a supervised classification based on the maximum likelihood classification (MLC) method was employed to classify the individual images independently. MLC is the most common type of supervised classification and has been widely used in the literature [24,[29][30][31][32]. This method has considered not only the mean or average values in assigning classification, but also the variability of brightness values in each class [33].…”

Karst bare slope soil erosion and soil quality: a simulation case study

“…A part of water and soil enter the underground rivers along with the fissures and the ponors, so that water and soil loss in karst regions is classified into surface loss and underground soil leak, which have obvious difference compared with that in non-karst regions such as agricultural land reported by Cerdà et al (2009aCerdà et al ( , b, 2010 and García-Orenes et al (2009). In non-karst regions, soil erosion is mainly related to surface cover, slope, and rainfall conditions (Cerdà, 2000;Giménez et al, 2010;Biro et al, 2013;Haregeweyn et al, 2013) and it could be prevented if people take reasonable measures (Haile and Fetene, 2012;Prokop and Poręba, 2012;Mandal and Sharda, 2013). However, due to special geologic structure in karst regions, soil erosion is rather more complicated than that in non-karst regions.…”