Abstract. Wadi Yalamlam is
known as one of the significant wadis in the west of Saudi Arabia. It is a
very important water source for the western region of the country. Thus, it
supplies the holy places in Mecca and the surrounding areas with drinking
water. The floristic composition of Wadi Yalamlam has not been
comprehensively studied. For that reason, this work aimed to assess the wadi
vegetation cover, life-form presence, chorotype, diversity, and community
structure using temporal remote sensing data. Temporal datasets spanning
4 years were acquired from the Landsat 8 sensor in 2013 as an early
acquisition and in 2017 as a late acquisition to estimate normalized
difference vegetation index (NDVI) changes. The wadi was divided into seven
stands. Stands 7, 1, and 3 were the richest with the highest Shannon index
values of 2.98, 2.69, and 2.64, respectively. On the other hand, stand 6 has
the least plant biodiversity with a Shannon index of 1.8. The study also
revealed the presence of 48 different plant species belonging to 24 families.
Fabaceae (17 %) and Poaceae (13 %) were the main families that form
most of the vegetation in the study area, while many families were
represented by only 2 % of the vegetation of the wadi. NDVI analysis
showed that the wadi suffers from various types of degradation of the
vegetation cover along with the wadi main stream.
Consideration of NDVI Thematic Changes on Density Analysis and Floristic Composition of Wadi Yalamlam, Saudi Arabia
