Desertification Assessment using plant cover and land management criteria with GIS

The purpose of this study is to deliberate human’s role in desertification. To achieve this purpose we’ve used vegetation destruction and land management criterion which land management creteria is including agriculture land management, rangeland management, mineral land management indecises and vegetation destruction criteria is including plant cover percentage, range trend, resistance against drought and conservation against erosion indecises. The data of each indicator imported to Arc GIS 9.3 after statistical analyzes and normality test with kolmogorov- smirnov method in SPSS. These data interpolated with IDW and normal & discrete kriging methods to produce their maps. Methods with highest accuracy have been selected. Then, the maps scored between 100 in 200 by MEDALUS approach and final map of each criterion have been created from geometric mean of its indicators. Finally current desertification status in Segzi plain of Isfahan has been created from geometric mean of all 6 criteria. The results showed that the area of severe and very severe classes of desertification equaled to 74,169 and 37,998 hectares, respectively. The results also showed that vegetation cover percentage and rangeland management are the most important indicators of classification in Segzi region of Isfahan.