Abstract:
Soil degradation is a serious environmental threat facing the humanity today. Soil
degradation in one or more of its forms has been labelled as a ‘global pandemic’.
This is because; soil degradation is a very serious world problem and affects all
countries or continents. Thus there is an acute need to devise a way of reducing its
vast advance. This is why, it is important to establish the magnitude and the extent
of soil degradations in order to mitigate its effect. The objectives of this study were
to:(i)Identify soils degraded by rill erosion with acceptable accuracy from remote
sensing images.(ii) Determine soil organic carbon status with acceptable accuracy
from remote sensing.(iii) Determine soil surface salt accumulation with acceptable
accuracy from remote sensing images. The soil degradation forms consider edin
this study are soil salinity, rill soil erosion and soil organic carbon. Nutrient depletion
is another significant chemical process of soil degradation. Soil organic carbon
depletion is a chemical degradation and in most instances is influenced by human
and natural activities. The assessment of these soil degradation forms has been
done in three separate chapters and detailed abstract is given at the start of each
chapter. However, the general findings revealed that the prediction of those soil
degradation forms from remotely sensed images did not yield good results.
Nonetheless, promising performance has been recorded. Recommendations for
feature studies are also provided.
