干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Erosion (by water or wind) is an increasing problem for many local authorities and government agencies throughout the world. The identification of eroded areas in arid and humid regions can be very useful for environmental planning and can help reduce soil and sediment degradation in these regions. In this work we present a new method to determine eroded areas in arid environment. In this method were explored lithological data to determine eroded areas. These data were collected in the field using GPS (Global Positioning System) checkpoints and geological maps. For that, two lithological maps of the study areas were analysed to determine lithological data change. Those two maps were obtained from the classification algorithm by applying the maximum likelihood on two Landsat satellite images. After images classification and validation a change detection technique was adopted to determine eroded areas. This method was applied in northern part of Atlantic Sahara desert to confirm their potentiality.