Mapping rangeland health with NDVI: A case study of the foothill Artemisia-ephemeral rangeland region in Uzbekistan

Natural rangelands play an important role in the agricultural sector in Uzbekistan, especially for livestock grazing. Many parts of these rangelands are, however, in a bad condition. The aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of using remote sensing to assess rangeland health in the Aktau foothills in the Samarkand region with a specific focus on the Artemisia-ephemeral rangelands. A Sentinel-2 dataset from 6 June 2022 was used to calculate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the area. The rangeland condition was then categorized into five classes built on the NDVI pixel information: healthy, regular, moderate, unhealthy, and bare soil.