Farshad Amiraslani - Assistant Professor, Faculty of Geography, University of Tehran, Azin alley, Qods Street, Enqelab Street, Tehran, Iran

Desertification is known as an anthropogenic and climatic hazard that affects the lives of over 2 billion people. This hazard impacts on social, ecological and economic aspects of human-being around the globe.This paper will examine desertification in an arid rangeland at the Fowlers Gap Station (Australia) over the last 150 years. This four-year research strived to establish a possible link among soil features, rainfall deficiencies and desertification using various contemporary spatial data (e.g. Landsat imagery) and old stationary rainfall records. Drought has been a common phenomenon at the Station over this period and recorded especially since the establishment of agricultural and pastoral setting in the area.As an innovated new approach to characterization of desertification and vegetation changes, the research utilized multi-scale quantitative modelling for recognizing patterns across a wide variety of spatial and temporal scales in the area. The results showed that a combination of factors have influenced on the initiation and development of desertification in the area. The ramifications of such phenomenon has been the expansion of patchy and scattered vegetation, removal of palatable plant species, destruction of natural habitats and elimination of native wildlife. The humanistic social impact of this phenomenon has also been enormous and wide-ranging.

Desertification, Australia, Hazard, rainfall, remote sensing