SUITMA 2005 Cairo - Remote sensing to assess changes in land vegetative cover in Saudi Arabia due to the second Gulf War
SUITMA 2005 Cairo
| This abstract is about one of the papers of the Consumed mining and military areas theme of the SUITMA 2005 symposium. |
| Mohammed Hussein Bagour,i | Sad Al-Mahlafe,ii |
| Abraham Jacob,iii | Ahmed Fahsi.iii |
- i - Department of Arid Land Agriculture, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
- ii - Presidency of Meteorology and Environment, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
- iii - Environmental Consulting Bureau, Rakah, Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia.
Changes in land vegetative cover in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia due to the second Gulf War activities of 1991 were assessed using remote sensing imagery. The study area is approximately 800x800 km along the border of Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf coast. The basis of the study is the identification of changes in imagery prior to, just after, and a decade following the war. Detection focused on areas where smoke plumes may have occurred, as well as rather intense military activities based on data and information provided in earlier studies. Two types of imagery, namely, Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and Landsat/Thematic Mapper (TM) were utilized covering years corresponding to intervals prior and after the war.
To enhance detection of changes in land vegetative cover, multiple techniques were tested to achieve best results. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed to extract significant changes over broad areas. PCA removes data redundancy usually common in image bands that appears similar and conveys essentially the same information. Additionally, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was employed. NDVI has been used for many years to monitor plant growth (vigor), vegetation cover, and biomass production from multispectral satellite data. The Chavez Principle Component Differencing (CPCD), which is a variation of PCA, was also tested to improve data interpretation.
The AVHRR results show some coarse changes in vegetation between the pre-war and post-war intervals. Due to its coarse resolution, AVHRR is only one of several indices to detect vegetation change; however, it did identify specific areas where more detailed analysis should be conducted. TM data show distinctive areas of damage from the smoke plumes and military activities. The greatest change in the vegetative cover took place during the years 1990 to 1992, but the change magnitude declined progressively to the year 2001. These results are reproduced on a georeferenced map showing the location and the extent of changes as affected by war activities.
