Abstract
Since the 20th centuries, the Southwest of Indian Ocean is particularly affected by anthropogenic degradations. This study aims to analyze degradations on drainage basin scale, which allows a suitable monitoring of critical areas, in the southwest of Indian Ocean. It focus on the assessment of land degradation and its causes, land cover change and erosion.The main difficulty stands in the implementation of reproducible methods and proceeds for developed and developing countries. In light of this, remote sensing data are relevant. Those data enable a regular observation of phenomena, allowing a full description of isolated lands and at different scale. This study combined, remote sensing data processing, spatial analysis and modeling to analyze degradations. Approaches include, data collection, their formatting or their preprocessing. Land cover information provided from Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) methodologies and Geographical Information System (GIS) authorized data conditioning and modeling. On the Fiherenana catchment, soil loss has been computed taking into account land cover changes. Those information were provided from SPOT 4 and 5 images from 2001 to 2013. Results confirmed the forest degradation especially in Ranobé, where we recorded a loss of more than 230 km² over 12 years. Lands affected by erosion process, spatialized and quantified by RUSLE model, also increased over this period. On La Rivière des Pluies, IGN’s orthophotographies, from 1997 until 2012, permitted urbans imprint analyzing. On Grand Éboulis site, vegetation monitoring revealed slumps. The study exposed spatial and quantitative results highlighting degradations dynamics on catchm