TITLE:
Investigation of Vegetation Cover Change in Sudan by Using Modis Data
AUTHORS:
Yousif Elnour Yagoub, Zhongqin Li, Omer Said Musa, Muhammad Naveed Anjum, Feiteng Wang, Chunhai Xu, Zhang Bo
KEYWORDS:
Land Cover Changes, Climate Factors, NDVI, Sudan
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.9 No.3,
June
9,
2017
ABSTRACT: The aim of this
research paper is to investigate the land cover changes in Sudan during the
period 2001-2013 by using the MODIS data and to identify climatic factors
influencing the land cover. SPSS v 17 software was used to investigate the
correlation of climatic factors with vegetation cover; also ArcGIS v 10.2
software was used to analyze the NDVI data. The results indicate that the
monthly average time scale, NDVI value curve distribution during the year, July
to October as the center to both sides of decreasing vegetation cover in other
months. In the spatial distribution of mean NDVI in Sudan, a high value was
found in the southern part. On the other hand, a low value of vegetation cover
was found in northern part. NDVI spaces mean presenting features values: autumn
followed by summer then winter. By calculation of average annual and
seasonal-NDVI values, it was deduced that the main vegetation cover type was
increasing in winter and summer seasons at the rates of 0.014/10a and
0.008/10a, respectively. While winter-NDVI was decreasing the rate of 0.001/10a
and 0.026/10a in autumn and on the annual scale, respectively. Annual NDVI
showed a significant degradation (area = 12705.7 km2, 0.5% of total area) in
the middle and eastern parts and significant improvement (area = 22485.4 km2,
0.9 % of the total area) in the southern part of the country due to the
increase in precipitation and decrease in temperature. Mean summer and
autumn-NDVI showed a significant difference 0.01% significance level with mean
summer and autumn precipitation (correlation coefficients = 0.955 and 0.953,
respectively). While there was a significantly negative relationship between mean summer and
autumn-NDVI with mean summer and autumn temperature at 0.01% significance level
(correlation coefficients = −0.270 and −0.820, respectively).