Land Degradation States and Trends in the Northwestern Maghreb Drylands, 1998–2008

States of ecological maturity and temporal trends of drylands in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia north of 28°N are reported for 1998–2008. The input data were Normalized Difference Vegetation Index databases and corresponding climate fields, at a spatial resolution of 1 km and a temporal resolution of one month. States convey opposing dynamics of human exploitation and ecological succession. They were identified synchronically for the full period by comparing each location to all other locations in the study area under equivalent aridity. Rain Use Efficiency (RUE) at two temporal scales was used to estimate proxies for biomass and turnover rate. Biomass trends were determined for every location by stepwise regression using time and aridity as predictors. This enabled human-induced degradation to be separated from simple responses to interannual climate variation. Some relevant findings include large areas of degraded land, albeit improving over time or fluctuating with climate, but rarely degrading further; smaller, but significant areas of mature and reference vegetation in most climate zones; very low overall active degradation rates throughout the area during the decade observed; biomass accumulation over time exceeding depletion in most zones; and negative feedback between land states and trends suggesting overall landscape persistence. Semiarid zones were found to be the most vulnerable. Those results can be disaggregated by country or province. The combination with existing land cover maps and national forest inventories leads to the information required by the two progress indicators associated with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification strategic objective to improve the conditions of ecosystems and with the Sustainable Development Goal Target 15.3 to achieve land degradation neutrality. Beyond that, the results are also useful as a basis for land management and restoration.

This research was funded by the following projects: DeSurvey IP (European Commission FP6 Contract No. 003950), CLIMEDE (NATO Collaborative Linkage Grant ref. 983596), MesoTopos (Junta de Andalucia PE P08-RNM-04023) and MELODIES (European Commission FP7, Contract No. 603525), which also covered open access publishing. Four anonymous reviewers made constructive comments and suggestions that improved the manuscript. We acknowledge support by the CSIC Open Access Publication Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI).