PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
September 2020
529
BOOK
REVIEW
Geospatial Technologies for Land
Degradation Assessment and
Management
R. S. Dwivedi
CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, LLC Boca Raton FL
2019, xxiii and 391 pp., black and white figures, tables, index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4987-4960-2 (Hardback)
Hardback: $127.31; Paperback: $54.95; Kindle: $25.26
Reviewed by
Demetrio P. Zourarakis, PhD, GISP, CMS
Borrowing inspiration from a well-known agency motto, a
better title for Dr. Dwivedi’s book might have possibly been
“Remote Sensing for a Sustainable Land.” At a time in which
concern about monitoring the nature, intensity, extent, and
rates of land and soil changes reaches fever pitches, this
book brings to the reader, a fusion of foundational knowledge
of remote sensing and the opportunities this science and
allied technologies present for successful application to the
problem.
This book is a timely effort in the sense that it resonates
intimately with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
just fleshed out by the United Nations for their 2030 Agenda
. In them desertification,
drought, and land degradation processes are made an
explicit target for remediation, prevention, and conservation
efforts.
The unspoken but compelling premise of the book is that
planetary health is synonymous with land health, which is
in turn inextricably linked to soil health, even though these
types of “health” are hard to measure and quantify. Thus,
the terms “land” and “soil” are used interchangeably in the
context of this book, both serving as substrate to a good por-
tion of life on Earth. Dr. Dwivedi sets out to explore exam-
ples of the ways in which Earth-observing, remote sensing
science and technologies can be applied to the problems of
monitoring, detecting, modeling, mapping, and remediating
negative changes in land and soils.
While the slant towards soil science and technology will
satisfy readers with a background related to this specific
domain, the book provides a bridge to a geospatial communi-
ty by providing specific examples of sensor data exploitation
and utilization. The perspective of both domains is thus
enriched with a broader view and greater appeal by showcas-
ing a diversity of remote sensing methods used to measure,
monitor, and assess numerical indicators of land and soil
health, for management purposes.
To illustrate the methodologies employed, the author chose
for monitoring a sample of negative land and soil changes of
interest, such as erosion, acidification, alkalinization and sa-
linization. Desertification, vegetation degradation, and land
loss to urbanization and industrial use are mentioned in the
section on fundamentals of land degradation (Chapter 5). It
would have been useful if the author had included examples
of the effects of invasive species, and of the effects on shore-
line changes due to sea/ocean rise, and due to the increasing
frequency of violent storms.
Not unlike the structure followed by Dr. Dwivedi’s previ-
ous book (
Remote Sensing of Soils
, 2017. Springer-Verlag,
GmbH, Germany), the first four chapters take up 148 pages
or 40% of the book and are devoted to providing a solid ex-
position of the fundamentals of remote sensing (i.e. Chap-
ter 1—An Introduction to Geospatial Technology; Chapter
2—Passive Remote Sensing; Chapter 3—Active Remote
Sensing; Chapter 4—Digital Image Processing). Chapters 5
through 10 cover the remaining 230 pages and they guide
the reader through a sampler of land degradation processes
(i.e. Chapter 5—An Introduction to Land Degradation; Chap-
ter 6—Water Erosion; Chapter 7—Wind Erosion; Chapter
8—Soil Salinization and Alkalinization; Chapter 9—Soil
Acidification; Chapter 10—Waterlogging; Chapter 11—Land
Degradation due to Mining, Aquaculture, and Shifting Cul-
tivation; Chapter 12—Drought). The effects of land use (i.e.
mining, aquaculture and shifting cultivation) on land health
are exemplified in Chapter 11.
The role played by global databases (i.e. big data) and the
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 86, No. 9, September 2020, pp. 529–530.
0099-1112/20/529–530
© 2020 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.86.9.529
