Damascus countryside-SANA
Today, at the headquarters of the Arab Center for Studies of Dry Areas and Dry Lands (ACSD), with the participation of the Union of Arab Agricultural Engineers and the Electronic Biodiversity Group, a virtual training course on methods for measuring and evaluating land degradation began.
Dr. Nasr El-Din El-Obeid, Director General of ACSAD, stressed in a speech via video conference technology during the opening of the course, which is attended by 119 trainees from 12 Arab countries, its importance in terms of access to the latest technologies used in monitoring the state of land and timely intervention, which is one of the most important factors of global trends in combating Desertification and restoration of degraded lands and return them to the optimum state of production.
Al-Obeid pointed to the need to coordinate efforts in dealing with desertification and land degradation issues in line with ACSAD’s mission in the Arab region, noting that ACSAD’s center relies, in monitoring land degradation, on the use of multi-date satellite data and spectral and spatial discrimination capabilities to locate degraded sites and prepare their maps by integrating sensor technologies. Remote field work.
Al-Obaid also gave a brief presentation on the success stories achieved by ACSAD in many Arab countries, which gave outstanding results in the context of conservation and reclamation of pastures, pointing to the important role that it plays as an Arab expert house in the field of building Arab capacities in various fields of agricultural development, which contributed to raising efficiency Technical and administrative staff for Arab agricultural.
Al-Obeid stressed that the necessity of preserving land, limiting its degradation and mitigating the negative effects of the current climate changes, in a way that contributes to achieving Arab food security called for in the Cairo Declaration issued by the meeting of the thirty-sixth session of the General Assembly of ACSAD 2022.
The course lasts for two days, during which a number of ACSAD experts and researchers will present various scientific lectures dealing with methods and methodologies for assessing and estimating wind erosion, monitoring dust storms using remote sensing, as well as estimating water erosion using modeling and evaluating its severity, among others.
Ghassob Abboud
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