Land degradation of Agro-Pastoral Zigzag Zone in Northern China based on RS and GIS

This paper presents a study on land degradation tendency in the middle part of the North Agro-Pastoral Zigzag Zone. Depending mainly on 1990 and 2002 TM images, and with other data such as soil, DEM etc., the results show that: about 45.8% of the land in the studied area has a problem of degradation. The most important type of land degradation problem is sandy desertification and water erosion is the second and the limited salinization soils mainly centralized around drying lakes and limited irrigating farming lands. However, the degradation level decrease from Northwestern to the Southeastern of the studied area, with the degradation type changes from sandy desertification to water erosion