Remote sensing and GIS to assess land degradation: A case study from Lebanon

Abstract

Lebanon is known for its natural components, notably its natural resources. Nevertheless, inadequate management practices have led to the depletion of these resources in recent times. In the last few years, several aspects of land degradation in Wadi El Hjeir have been well-pronounced, and this has been associated with natural and human interference. This includes climate change, forest fire, quarrying, overgrazing, chaotic wastes disposal, and other unfavourable human activities For this reason, a set of satellite images (e.g., Sentinel-2) were processed to detect land cover changes between 2015 and 2020, although there is a short period of time between 2015 and 2020 because of sentinel-2 quality and its bands we were able to detect some differences in the land degradation that exists since the period of time should be 20 years to observe the differences but because sentinel-2 is modern as for its images we were able to observe the differences in this short time period. This has been accompanied by GIS application. The study aimed at determining the spatial and temporal changes in Wadi El Hjeir, a typical of Lebanese protected area, which has been designated lately as a Natural Reserve .The achieved work was based on identifying the major factors of land degradation, which were determined using satellite images for geo-spatial data extraction, and GIS for data analysis and manipulation where quantitative components were also addressed to identify changes in land use distribution over the last five years. This has been followed with field surveys to investigate in-depth the types and dimensions of land degradation in the area of study.