P S Dhinwa

This paper by ISRO broadly deals with desertification and the process of land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas. It describes the classification system, methodology and results of the desertification & land degradation status mapping carried out for the entire country on 1: 500,000 scale using multi-temporal Resourcesat AWiFS data. The dominant processes of land degradation, viz. water erosion, vegetal degradation, wind erosion, salinization, waterlogging, frost heaving, frost shattering and mass movement have been deciphered and mapped using satellite data.