Evaluación y seguimiento multitemporal de la desertificación en Andalucía

Abstract

Desertification, as a process of degradation caused by the confluence of certain arid or semiarid climatic conditions together with aggressive and barely sustainable human activities in the natural and productive environment, and also bearing in mind the current context of climate change, is an environmental phenomenon whose monitoring would seem to be advisable, both with regard to its evolution in recent years and in relation to the changes that the new climatic scenarios may determine, in order to prepare mitigation or enhancement strategies, and also to raise greater awareness of the approaching problems. The availability of historical information in a Geographic Information System referring to land uses and land cover and to climatic data, together with other environmental information (relief, soils, geology, environment management.....), as well as decade-by-decade climatic information on possible future change scenarios until 2100 in the Andalusian Environmental Information Network (REDIAM), has permitted, within the framework the European projects DesertNet I and DesertNet II, the development of models for diagnosing the areas affected by historical desertification processes and the areas of present and future incidence, while at the same time a common methodology is applied to the European context for the delimitation of degradation-sensitive areas. These models have been applied to the entire territory of Andalusia, providing a view of the temporal and spatial incidence of this phenomenon.