Results

Analysis of natural vegetation resistance to drought periods in the Guadalentin basin, SE Spain

Variation in the state of the vegetation cover is one of the most important factors controlling the drought, erosion and desertification processes in arid and semi-arid lands. For this reason, monitoring of the vegetation cover is one of the important applications of remotely sensed data. The imagery used to obtain this result are Landsat Thematic Mapper. A specific software was developed to process these imagery. In order to analyse the relationship between climatic data (accumulated precipitation and temperature) and NDVI variation in Guadalentin basin, the obtained climatic data was used to generate precipitation and temperature images. In order to produce maps at the same scale of the multitemporal NDVI images (calculated with Landsat-TM data), the total accumulated precipitation and mean temperature was then used to generate precipitation and temperature image corresponding to the UTM image coordinates scale of the existing NDVI images (30 m resolution). For such purpose, the kriging method was used for the generation of both precipitation and temperature images. Once the precipitation and temperature images were generated, both are used jointly with the multitemporal NDVI images for the analysis of the vegetation cover variation in the area.