Abstract
Abstract. Wadi Yalamlam is known as one of the significant wadis in the west of Saudi Arabia. It is a very important water source for the western region of the country. Thus, it supplies the holy places in Mecca and the surrounding areas with drinking water. The floristic composition of Wadi Yalamlam has not been comprehensively studied. For that reason, this work aimed to assess the wadi vegetation cover, life-form presence, chorotype, diversity, and community structure using temporal remote sensing data. Temporal datasets spanning 4 years were acquired from the Landsat 8 sensor in 2013 as an early acquisition and in 2017 as a late acquisition to estimate normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) changes. The wadi was divided into seven stands. Stands 7, 1, and 3 were the richest with the highest Shannon index values of 2.98, 2.69, and 2.64, respectively. On the other hand, stand 6 has the least plant biodiversity with a Shannon index of 1.8. The study also revealed the presence of 48 different plant species belonging to 24 families. Fabaceae (17 %) and Poaceae (13 %) were the main families that form most of the vegetation in the study area, while many families were represented by only 2 % of the vegetation of the wadi. NDVI analysis showed that the wadi suffers from various types of degradation of the vegetation cover along with the wadi main stream.
Highlights
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a big desert with a land area of approximately 2 250 000 km2 comprising the basic area of the Arabian Peninsula
Many studies and comparisons of families involving a large number of species have been conducted for various regions of Saudi Arabia such as the Asir Mountains in Hosni and Hegazy (1996), Mosallam (2007) in the Taif area, Alatar et al (2012) in the Al-Jufair Wadi, and Al-Turki and AlOlayan (2003) in the Hail region
The most famous plant species in Saudi Arabia belong to the families Fabaceae and Asteraceae (Migahid, 1978; Chaudhary, 1999; Rahman et al, 2004)
Summary
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a big desert with a land area of approximately 2 250 000 km comprising the basic area of the Arabian Peninsula. According to Abuzinada et al (2005), the natural areas and biological diversity are very large in the kingdom, and these factors are very important for dealing with ecosystems. The geographical location of Saudi Arabia between the surrounding continents indicates the importance of the vegetation structure in the kingdom. According to Collenette (1998), some areas in Saudi Arabia like the Asir, Alhejaz, and the western mountains have high floristic diversity. These mountain chains are near the Red Sea and they have the greatest level of rainfall (Sen et al, 2017). Some researchers have demonstrated that the topography and climate of the area are affecting the level of speciation
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