Desertification takes place worldwide in drylands and affects the livelihoods of millions of people, including a large proportion of the poor. Drylands include all terrestrial regions where water scarcity limits the production of crops, forage, wood, and other ecosystems provisioning services. Land degradation and desertification are associated with biodiversity loss and contributes to global climate change through loss of carbon sequestration capacity and an increase in land-surface albedo. However the magnitude and impacts of desertification processes vary greatly in space and over time, and there is still a lack in observing and understanding these processes and their underlying factors.
The session intends to be a forum for interdisciplinary exchange of research approaches and results, involving characterization of desertification causes and underlying factors, discussion on the linkages among desertification, global climate change and biodiversity loss, searching for reliable indicators, especially those of early-warning, and presentation of strategies for monitoring and combat desertification. We welcome submissions that contribute to the understanding of land degradation and desertification processes, to their risk assessment and future changes, to the ability of models to reproduce them and methods to forecast them or produce early warnings for monitoring and management purposes in order to prevent or reverse these processes. We particularly invite contributions that make use of remote sensing as a tool for a better understanding of desertification locally, regionally and globally.