1. Land Change and Desertification in the South Asembo Region
Miranda Riemer
FR3262 Project

2. South Asembo Region along Lake Victoria shore near highlands of Kenya
extremely impoverished, AIDS, Malaria
polluted and extremely limited water resources
subsistence farming and deforestation to clear new land

4. Lake Victoria Facing drainage and desertification
Declined 6 feet in the last ten years
Increasing population in the area
Feeds Nile river
Extremely important ecologically

5. This Project
Compare land cover and shoreline over a twenty or so year period
Remote sensing allows us to do this remotely and accurately
Important to understand the effects of population, climate alterations, etc. on large land areas and important water bodies in Africa

6. Images Obtained images from Glovis online image search tool
One from 1984, and one from 2008
Chose images with extremely low (<10%) cloud cover, had to avoid ones with disturbances or other issues

8. Methods Images rectified (or so I thought) Unsupervised classification
20 classes
Convergence threshold of 0.950
50 max. iterations
means along principal axis
Identified classes
Thematic Recode
Picked colors
Tried to do a change analysis

9. Results

10. Results

11. Results Lake Victoria shoreline did decline
Natural vegetation and forest areas actually increased over the 24 years
couldn't do a change analysis to get quantitative results of the data

12. Discussion
Images were from two different months- could be why the forested areas were different
Issues with project partner had to be overcome
Learned (and relearned) a lot about ERDAS Imagine - yay!