Neil MANSPEIZER, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Arnon KARNIELI, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Differentiation between human/environmental driving forces of landuse/landcover change in the Judean foothills, Israel, entailed using archaeological survey data. Landuse history (4th c. BCE - 20th c. CE) was plotted in GIS and trend surfaces built that describe the 2300 years of cumulative landuse intensity. Areas of more intense landuse are today barer while less intensely used areas are more perennial shrub and tree cover. These findings contribute to the literature regarding Mediterranean garrigue/maquis units and demonstrate that long-term landuse is a dominant driver of long-term landcover dynamics (landuse legacy). However, those results do not explicitly examine the environmental drivers, such as climate, on vegetation succession. Therefore, the intensively used areas were masked with GIS so that vegetation succession based on climate could be examined with remote sensing. All shrub species were classified along a ‘panoramic’ spectral scale across the EM spectrum (0.4-14 nm) with VENµS, Landsat 8 and LiDAR imagery. Previous research has distinguished shrub species in semi-arid environments as sclerophyll evergreen associated with wet periods and seasonal dimorphic phrygana associated with dry periods. The remote sensing analysis and fieldwork concentrated on identification of these units to relate them with climate regime. Bioenergetics methods, such as relating metabolism (respiration and photosynthesis) with solar irradiance, were employed to differentiate between sclerophyll/phrygana thermodynamic cycles. The panoramic spectral signatures from the remote sensing study were correlated with the bioenergetics study results and a climate-precipitation model, developed from Holocene Dead Sea levels, was used to contextualize the vegetation succession. The study demonstrates that climates do leave legacies so the drivers of LUCC may be classified according to human/environmental forces and remote sensing can monitor vegetation as an indicator of climate change.
Mots clés : climate legacy|LUCC|solar irradiance|remote sensing|vegetation thermodynamics
A102917NM