This Website and all original material produced and maintained by:
Greg Okin,
Postdoctoral Research at the
Department of Geography,
University of California, Santa Barbara.
Most desertification happens as "runaway" phenomena which are irreversible on human timescales. That is to say, once desertification starts it is hard to stop and almost impossible to remediate in an area. This has major implications for society's response to desertification, or the threat thereof. Since we may not be able "fix" an area that has undegone desertification, it becomes necessary to attempt to forecast arid land degradation in addition to monitoring the soil and vegetation status of deserts.
In the Caltech Arid Region Remote Monitoring group in the division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, we believe that forecasting of desertification will become possible in the future, and that monitoring of arid lands using new and future satellite remote sensing technologies will be important in future management of arid lands.
This work is being carried out at the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences by graduate student Greg Okin under the direction of Professor Bruce Murray.
Several other people are working on this project, or have done so in the past. Most notably, Dr. Terrill Ray wrote his doctoral thesis entitled "Remote Monitoring of Land Degradation in Arid/Semiarid Regions" on one type of desertification associated with central pivot agriculture in SE California. It is available in it's entirety here in ".pdf" format. Go to "Web Viewing Tools" on the left if you don't already know about .pdf format or Adobe Acrobat.
We are working on several research sites in the arid Southwest. These are shown on the clickable map below.
This site is organized so that you can use the "Navigate" menu bar on the left to get around, and pages are organized both by site and research interest.
Note: much of the text in this web site is taken from Ray's thesis. As it has been added to and changed, no attempt has been taken to reference those portions taken from the thesis.