Monitoring Land Productivity Trends in Souss-Massa Region Using Landsat Time Series Data to Support SDG Target 15.3

Abstract

AbstractThe first step towards achieving a land degradation-neutral world and restoring degraded land and soil is to efficiently and accurately identify these lands at national and subnational levels. This step represents one of the targets within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is worth recalling that the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has adopted three sub-indicators for monitoring and assessing land degradation (Trends in Land Cover, Land Productivity, and Carbon Stocks). Through this study, we tried to take an important step in measuring the proportion of degraded land in the Souss-Massa region; we evaluated the sub-indicator Land Productivity at the pixel level (30 m) using Google Earth Engine (GEE). In addition, it should be emphasized that we used two decades of Landsat imagery and we chose the period between 2000 and 2015 as the baseline, while the comparison period was the one between 2016 and 2019. The results of this research showed that in the 4 years between 2016 and 2019, the Souss-Massa region has experienced remarkable changes in land degradation. We noted that 7.11% of the area of the region shows some improvement compared to 4.51% of the land that has degraded, while the rest of the zone which represents 88.38%, has not undergone any significant changes. To sum up, this study will constitute an important step in the assessment of land degradation in the Souss-Massa region and subsequently on all the Moroccan territory.KeywordsLand degradationSustainable Development Goals (SDGs)LandsatGoogle earth engineLand productivityNDVI