The potential of satellite remote sensing of ecological conditions for survey and forecasting desert-locust activity

Abstract

Agricultural crops and rangeland resources over above 30 million km² in some 55 Third World countries arc subject to ravages by the desert locust. Successful breeding, triggered by suitable ecological conditions when widespread rainfall results in development of vegetation in the desert-locust recession area, can produce rapid increases in desert-locust populations, resulting, if uncontrolled, in large numbers of highly mobile and devastating swarms containing billions of locusts. Satellite remote sensing offers the only possibility of monitoring the 16 million km² desert-locust recession area situated largely in remote and inaccessible deserts of northern and eastern Africa, the Near East, and south-west Asia. Use of LANDSAT and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite imagery for analyses of green vegetation blooms in desert-locust breeding areas suggests an operational programme based upon the NOAA Advanced Very-High-Resolution Radiometer sensor