Abstract
Inappropriate land-use on a fragile ecological condition have greater impact on the natural state of rangelands making land degradation a common phenomenon. Usage of remote sensing has become an ideal choice for monitoring these natural resources. SPOT 5 imagery was used, in this study for characterizing land cover classes and mapping vegetation distribution in the North West Province, South Africa by employing the maximum likelihood classification technique. Regression technique was also used to assess relationship between rainfall distribution and proportion of bare ground. Water body, bare ground, indicators of erosion, built-up area, grass and shrubs were the LULC classes in the image classification. Except for indicators of erosion, all the land-cover classes were classified with higher accuracies (in average, >0.78 overall accuracies and 0.70 for Kappa). However, SPOT 5 imagery yielded low overall accuracy (< 0.3) for indicators of erosion. Strong coefficient of determination (r²=0.80) was detected between average rainfall and proportion of bare ground indicating that rainfall is the most important factor in controlling the spatial distribution of vegetation in the study sites.
Highlights
Inappropriate land use and high population density in concurrence with fragile ecological conditions have greater influence on the natural state of rangelands in semi-arid and arid areas where land degradation and expansion of woody vegetation often further deteriorate the livelihoods of the impoverished people who directly depend on natural resources
In the low rainfall area, of Morokweng communal lands, bare ground comprised the larger area coverage followed by grasses/herbaceous vegetation with the least extent of indicators of erosion
SPOT 5 imagery was used for mapping land cover features in the study sites and this data source was assessed for its capacity for mapping different biophysical indicators of rangelands such as indicators of erosion and proportion of bare ground besides land cover classes using the maximum likelihood classification technique
Summary
Inappropriate land use and high population density in concurrence with fragile ecological conditions have greater influence on the natural state of rangelands in semi-arid and arid areas where land degradation and expansion of woody vegetation often further deteriorate the livelihoods of the impoverished people who directly depend on natural resources. In the North-West province, unpalatable trees and shrub encroachment, a wide spread form of rangeland degradation at the expense of palatable vegetation over long period of time as well as expansion of bare ground are major problems. This scenario is believed to be triggered and aggravated by climatic phenomena and livestock grazing [1,2]. Disruption of hydrological cycle in rangelands can cause a desert like weather pattern [9] resulting into an increasing proportion of bare ground exposure This scenario is a bigger challenge in most communal lands of South Africa. Restriction of livestock movements at a confined locality can cause serious rangeland degradation even when the number of the livestock is smaller [10,11] indicated that despite an average reduction of livestock, stocking rates in some regions of the world, the recent increase in livestock quantities per individual farms is causing higher land degradation around residential areas
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