干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

By establishing the interpreting elements, and applying supervised classification, the sandy desertification was interpreted and the desertified land areas of the counties in the western Jilin Province in 1986 and in 2000 were obtained. Taking Tongyu and Qian’an as examples, the natural driving forces and man-made driving forces were analyzed. The paper comes the conclusions that the material sources and the warming and dry climate are the internal causes of potential land desertification; the irrational human activities, such as destroying forest and reclaiming the grassland, are the external causes of potential land desertification; while more rational human activities, such as planting trees and restoring grassland can reverse the land desertification. Furthermore, the countermeasures and suggestions for the development of agriculture and animal husbandry in the western Jilin Province are put forward.