Remote Monitoring of Desertification in Kalmykia

Abstract—Geoinformation technologies for assessing the desertification of arid territories provide the determination of the spatial position of research objects, as well as the fixation of changes in the territories in the spatio-temporal aspect under the influence of climatic and anthropogenic factors that determine such changes. Remote, spatio-temporal monitoring consists in mapping desertification areas with accurate geo-referencing of objects and determining the changes that have occurred on them over time (Mariam Akhtar-Schuster, 2020). The assessment of the degree of desertification is based on the classification of desertification types and the methodology of remote studies of degradation sites and geoinformation technologies (Yuferev, 2007). Taking the criteria of ecological state zones (norm, risk, crisis, and disaster) for various types of agricultural land (Vinogradov, 1984) as a basis, we determined the criteria for remote monitoring of environmental disaster zones using up-to-date satellite images on the territory of the Republic of Kalmykia. The use of remote methods for desertification assessment for monitoring makes it possible to identify spatial changes in the monitoring area when the level of impact of anthropogenic and climatic factors changes. Mathematical and statistical processing of the results obtained in spatio-temporal studies make it possible to identify the functional relationships between the area of desertification and the magnitude of the natural and anthropogenic factors, on the basis of which it becomes possible to develop a mathematical model of such changes. Such a model reflects the probable development of the area of desertification, depending on the actual combination of the most significant factors, thus, the choice of such factors is important in modeling. Modeling the degree of degradation is based on an assessment of the size of areas subject to a certain degree of degradation and a mathematical description of the processes of changing their state. As a result, the desertification areas and changes in the areas of these zones were determined in the study area. The monitoring of desertification according to remote survey data of the territory of Kalmykia made it possible to determine an increase in areas subject to desertification by almost 4 times, from 750 to 3000 thousand hectares from 1984 to 2020.