| 个人简介 | |
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 Prof. Elias Symeonakis Manchester Metropolitan University, UK |
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| 标题： Assessing land degradation with Earth Observation: current advances and future directions | |
| 摘要： For decades now, land degradation has been identified as one of the most pressing problems facing the planet. Alarming estimates are often published by the academic community and intergovernmental organisations, claiming that a third of the planet is undergoing various degradation processes and almost half of the world’s population is already residing in degraded lands. Moreover, as land degradation directly affects vegetation biophysical processes and leads to changes in ecosystem functioning, it has a knock-on effect on habitats and, therefore, on numerous species of flora and fauna that become endangered or/and extinct. The processes that have more commonly been identified as the driving factors behind land degradation are both anthropogenic as well as climatic, and numerous studies have thus far attempted to disentangle the nexus between the two. Most prominent causes have appeared to be the processes of soil erosion by water or wind, soil salinization, gully erosion, natural hazards, land use/cover change, agricultural expansion or abandonment, deforestation, urbanisation, grazing intensification, bush encroachment, fuelwood extraction and drought. By far the most widely used approach in assessing land degradation has been to employ Earth observation data. Especially during the last decade, with technological advancements and the computational capacity of computers on the one hand, together with the availability of open-access remotely-sensed data archives on the other, numerous studies dedicated in the study of the various aspects of land degradation have been undertaken. The spectral, spatial and temporal resolution of these studies varies considerably, and multiscale, multitemporal and multisensor approaches have also evolved. A paradigm shift is taking place as we transition from change detection to monitoring and, consequently, time–series analysis techniques are becoming more sophisticated and relevant to deal with the voluminous satellite data archives at our disposition. | |
| 简介： Dr Elias Symeonakis is a Remote Sensing Scientist from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), UK, that produces World-leading research related with land degradation assessments, mainly over sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean region. He leads the Remote Sensing Research Group of MMU (www.remote-sensing-mmu.org) and has developed the first-ever pan-African land degradation monitoring system. He has led a number of EU Projects and has been awarded a number of other Leverhulme Trust, Newton Fund, British Council and UNDP projects related with land cover mapping, monitoring and modelling. His latest EU project (LanDDApp) focused on woody vegetation encroachment in South African savannahs and produced state-of-the-art methodologies for highly accurate mapping of savannah land cover types. He has published >40 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, and acts as External Expert Reviewer of IPCC and IPBES reports. | |
