Establishment of rocky desertification index in Southwest of China

Rocky desertification is a type of land desertification. It comes from the fragile ecological and geological environment, where the human activity is very strong and the land productivity is degraded severely. As a natural disaster, rocky desertification is very destructive, and it is very difficult to be recovered. The karst region of China in southwest is the world´s concentrated karsts region. It is also one of the largest contiguous karsts regions. The karst region is also the most typical ecological fragile regions in China. We utilized the ETM+ images in 2000 to study the rocky desertification of the north regions in Guangxi province in the past ten years. Firstly, the rocky exponential model was established to extract rocky desertification information of the region. Then, the RGB image was composited to interpret and obtain the rocky desertification. Our experiment showed that rocky desertification of the karst region can be classified into no rocky desertification, moderate desertification, and severe rocky desertification.