The desertification affects more than 250,000 ha in the district of
Errachidia and results in the expansion of desert landscapes such as the
Regs, Hamadas and the Dunes. The latter is a big concern in the district
since it is the source of siltation, which threatens dwellings,
cultivated lands and water bodies. It is of paramount importance to
understand the causes and consequences of silting to develop strategies
to combat it. Thus, first, we analysed the spatial and temporal dynamics
of sand dunes until 2069 by applying the Seasonal Autoregressive
Integrated Moving-Average (SARIMA) model on a time series of sand dune
areas. These areas were calculated annually from 1987 to 2019 by
computing the sand cover index (SCI) on Landsat satellite images.
Furthermore, we evaluated the influence of different natural and human
factors such as temperature, precipitation, wind, vegetation, and
population growth, on sand dune dynamics using Spearman’s correlation
test. The results indicated that the area of sand dunes will increase by
1.7% per year between 2019 and 2069 in the district of Errachidia. This
increase would be mainly caused by the combined action of ecological
factors, which vary from year to year. In general, temperature and
precipitation act indirectly on wind and vegetation to influence the
dynamics of sand dunes in hyper-arid areas where the soil is bare or
poorly covered with vegetation, where precipitation is low and where
temperature is high.
Modelling and assessing driving factors of the spatial and temporal dynamics of the sand dunes in the district of Errachidia, Morocco