ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF LAND DESERTIFICATION

Abstract

Agricultural lands of the Russian Federation are intensively subjected to degradation and desertification as a result of irrational economic activity, which, against the background of unfavorable climatic factors, led to the destruction of natural ecosystems, degradation of the soil cover and ultimately to the creation of the unfavorable ecological environment. About 65 % of 130 million hectares of arable land, are exposed to water and wind erosion. Only by water erosion, 10 % of arable land lost 30–60 % of fertility and almost 25 % lost 10–30 %. As a result of deflation 25million hectares of agricultural land in the European part of the Russian Federation are degraded to varying degrees. The concept of the anti-degradation arrangement proposes to use environmental-economic geoinformational monitoring. Within the framework of this approach, the development of cartographic and mathematical models in three time environments is proposed: pre-agricultural, modern degraded, and certainly improved condition. The ecological and economic analysis makes it possible to synthesize information flows and analyze the most important degradation processes. The most important tool for implementing ther adaptive-landscape anti-degradation arrangement of agricultural landscapes is precision farming, which consists of several subsystems: decision-making, monitoring, agronomic techniques, specialized equipment, etc. Computer technologies and telecommunications allow to speed up and optimize production by combining technology and people, which helps reduce costs. Precision agriculture is impossible without using modern advances in collecting, processing and storage of various, often heterogeneous, agricultural information.

Keywords

• desertification
• land degradation
• dust storm
• gis technology
• adaptive-landscape design