ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the important topic of land degradation in southern Africa. It considers approaches to reconstruct both current and historical erosion rates, focusing on the period since the arrival of Europeans who brought many of their farming and management practices with them. The chapter considers direct measurement, remote sensing, fingerprinting and modelling as approaches to the monitoring and assessment of land degradation. It is evident that southern Africa is currently data poor in relation to erosion and sediment yield information, although techniques are available for collecting information at large and small catchment scales. Like many environments, southern African landscapes contain natural and artificially created sediment stores that preserve an archive of palaeoenvironmental conditions over a range of timescales. A sediment budget defines four components in terms of catchment sediment dynamics: sediment sources, transport pathways, storage areas and sediment export at the scale of the catchment or drainage basin over a specific timescale or over a range of different timescales.
