干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

In the last five years the MEDALUS project, being funded by the DG XII (Directorate General Science, Research and Development) of the European Commission, became a well known focus of desertification research in the Mediterranean regions of Europe. This broad interdisciplinary research programme has now entered the third phase (MEDALUS III) aiming towards the up-scaling and regionalisation of findings and methodologies achieved from prior MEDALUS studies at local and catchment scale respectively. It is evident that Remote Sensing gains increasing importance in the project through the issues of up-scaling and regionalisation. A basic objective in the remote sensing approaches to be followed by the authors is the spectral characterisation of environmentally sensitive areas (ESAs) and the definition of spectral indicators for land degradation processes at different scales. Results from prior research activities of the authors (e.g. DeMon 1, MEDALUS I/II) suggest, that quantitative measures of vegetation cover and soil development status form key indicators for the assessment of land degradation/desertification risk and can be obtained from spectral reflectance images of earth observation satellites.