Monitoring of land use change for the assessment of land management sustainability in the East Mediterranean Region

Abstract

Sustainable land management is of great importance for regional, national and international land use planning. It presents the primary aim of the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15 and contributes significantly to many other SDGs. Particularly, Goal 15 (Sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, halt biodiversity loss) points out the urgent need to fight desertification and land degradation. Desertification is the process during which billion hectares of rangeland and cropland degrade due to several factors such as climatic variations and human activities. This phenomenon poses a threat for about one-sixth of the world’s population, seventy percent of all drylands and one-quarter of the total land area of the world. To assess desertification, researchers characterize, quantify and monitor land use status and changes on a regional and a global level. Assessing and monitoring land management sustainability involves spatial and temporal variabilities as well as system complexities. In this paper, we analyse existing methodologies that integrate remote sensing and geospatial approaches to assess and monitor land use changes in the East Mediterranean Region. The reported methods enhance the identification of sustainably managed land fields and should be further exploited in order to promote a culture of sustainable land management regions vulnerable to climate change (e.g. Cyprus). Case studies of using both Landsat TM/ETM and Sentinel Copernicus data for the Cyprus area are demonstrated. This paper is under the H2020 Teaming Project ‘EXCELSIOR’ ‘EXcellence Research Centre for Earth SurveiLlance and Space-Based MonItoring Of the EnviRonment’ activities in which the existing Eratosthenes Centre of Excellence will be upgraded to a Centre of Excellence in Earth observation in the East-MED region. This project has received funding from the European Union’s “Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020)” under grant agreement No 763643. Work programme H2020 under “Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation”, call: H2020- WIDESPREAD-04-2017 Teaming Phase 1 (Coordination and support action). The EXCELSIOR project aims also of creating an inspiring environment for conducting basic and applied research and innovation in the areas of the integrated use of remote sensing and space-based techniques for monitoring the environment. Environment has been recognized by the Smart Specialization Strategy of Cyprus as the first horizontal priority for future growth of the island. Monitoring land use change is one of the main priorities of the Eratosthenes Centre of Excellence in the East-Med region.