Interdisciplinary drought risk assessment for agriculture: The case of communal farmers in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa.

Interdisciplinary drought risk assessment provides the true reflection of drought risk by integrating hazard data with adaptation, vulnerability and coping capacity. Traditional methods for drought risk calculation based purely on meteorological extremes do not provide an accurate reflection of disaster drought. Communal farmers in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa, experience disaster droughts regularly; even normal dry periods are experienced as disaster droughts.This research rejects the hypothesis of climate change as the reason for increased drought in the Northern Cape but rather highlight vulnerability and lack of coping capacity as the main sources of disaster droughts, especially amongst communal farmers in the Northern Cape

The effect of natural and human-induced habitat conditions on number of roe deer: case study of Vojvodina, Serbia

Roe deer (Capreolus capreolus L.) have greatly expanded in both distribution and abundanceduring the last few decades, and are the most abundant cervids in Europe today. The aim of this paper is to determine the factors that have the most considerable impact on roe deer numbers in the Vojvodina region (North Serbia). Environmental (area in ha, total area of forest and total area of meadows and pastures in hunting ground) and anthropogenic (number of registered hunters, number of hunting sections, number of gamekeepers and roads in km on 1,000 ha) factors had been shown to influence the number of roe deer in Vojvodina region. A multiple regression analysis was carried out as the main statistical approach. The mapping of certain parameters was done using ArcGIS 9.2 software in order to establish the relation between the roe deer population and the different environmental and anthropogenic conditions. The results signify that the roe deer number dependency in the Vojvodina region is a very complex and multi-factorial phenomenon, strongly influenced by human induced modifications

Forest fire analysis and classification based on a Serbian case study

A recent forest fire in the Republic of Serbia is discussed concerning classification, legislative framework and fire management, giving a detailed analysis of the forest fire occurrence. Analysing past and predicting future fires are crucial for policy development and forest management practices to prevent and mitigate fires. Fire hazard is discussed through several fire protection and prevention legislative documents. The nonparametric Mann-Kendall test was used to analyse resent forest fire data in an attempt to find causality in occurrences and frequency. The meteorological data and fire statistics provided by the Serbian Hydro-meteorological Service and the Ministry of Interior/Sector for Emergency Management of the Republic of Serbia were used to calculate the Forest Fire Weather Indices, along with deficit or surplus of precipitation for the case study of Tara Mountain. The paper highlights the need for better hierarchical classification of fire hazards and its harmonisation along with standardisations presented by leading international research institutions. A significant correlation between meteorological parameters and forest fire occurrence was found. This opens a possibility for further investigation and analysis of geophysical and anthropogenic driven factors that can influence disaster occurrence

Application of Landsat-derived NDVI in monitoring and assessment of vegetation cover changes in Central Serbia

This paper evaluates the application of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in the monitoring and assessment of temporal vegetation cover changes (from 2006 to 2014) in three municipalities of Central Serbia: Topola, Jagodina and Kuršumlija. Additionally, special focus is placed on the analysis of the forest areas and the possible use of NDVI in the forest management sector. Results of the NDVI applied through Idrisi software identify all vegetation cover types and their typical values for presented case studies and observed periods. Obtained results for Serbian case studies indicate two major observations outlined for the investigated period. It was noticed that vegetation cover is experiencing a certain decrease, and that certain discrepancies exists between the NDVI and official forest area statistics for certain municipalities. The study outlines the positive outcomes of the applied remote sensing techniques, especially for southern Serbian municipalities where illegal logging activities are pronounced. Hence, this method proved very promising for countries performing national forest inventories, such as Serbia, providing local forest managers with several essential up-to-date information about vegetation cover changes on an annual basis. © 2019 Carpathian Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences