**9. References**

216 Studies on Environmental and Applied Geomorphology

coastal zone. This Chapter indicates areas where urgent additional conservation actions are now required to protect the remaining natural habitats and wildlife populations from

Serious consideration should be given to prevent coastal development for industrial purposes, and instead have this development moved inland with resources currently used for coastal landfill employed instead to create inland connective waterways. This would free up these productive and attractive coastal regions for conservation, recreational and managed tourism and residential land use. This would significantly enhance the quality of

Other areas of the coastline are also extremely important for wildlife, and these areas tend to be the more remote locations such as the Offshore islands and isolated coastal regions such as the Gulf of Salwa and Ras Abu Qamees. Wildlife populations flourish in these areas due to the lack of physical disturbance from human related activities and also due to the large areas of relatively undisturbed habitats. These remote nesting, roosting and refuge locations, coupled with an abundance of nearby foraging resources results in very large populations of marine mammal (dugong and dolphin), marine turtles and marine birds inhabiting and breeding each year in these areas. These populations are not only significant within the Kingdom, but are also of regional and international importance. With increasing human populations and increased development pressure on the coastal zone, these remote undisturbed areas are becoming smaller and geographically closer to human settlements, and eventually wildlife populations will have no remaining undisturbed wilderness areas in which to exist, and this will be a great loss for the Kingdom, particularly for its future

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has good environmental strategies and legislation in place to protect the environment and these strategies and legislation only need to be effectively enforced. Changing public attitudes and behavior towards the environment is also a major objective that needs immediate attention with the development and implementation of

There are existing proposed conservation reservation areas along the Gulf coast (Maps 8 and 13) and these incorporate the remaining few natural regions of the Gulf coastal zone including Ras Abu Qamees, the Gulf of Salwa, Tarut Bay, the Jubail Embayment and the offshore coral islands (Map 15). These recommendations should be immediately reviewed and alterations made that ensure the conservation of these areas' biodiversity is guaranteed while at the same time promoting sustainable development and use by the areas' stakeholders. Conservation reservations do not have to exclude all other uses and activities, and in fact some hydrocarbon coastal reservation areas are testament to this, with these areas containing the greatest proportion of undisturbed coastline and intact habitats (e.g., mangroves) than many other areas along the Gulf coastline. Good environmental stewardship can allow nature conservation and sustainable development to flourish within the same geographical areas, it is really all about management of the area's natural resources to ensure that their inherent values are maintained and where possible enhanced. The earlier recommendations of the United Nations Environmental Program for Tarut Bay had this particular notion in mind when they nominated Tarut Bay as a Class V and VI reservation. This identified the Bay as a significant public use and amenity resource where traditional activities such as fishing could continue, and new developments that were in

environmental awareness and education programs aimed at all levels of society.

continued impact resulting from rapid and hastening coastal development.

life for the residents of the Eastern Province.

generations.


**9** 

*1Ghana* 

*2The Netherlands* 

**Comparison of SRTM and ASTER** 

Gerald Forkuor1 and Ben Maathuis2 *1International Water Management Institute,* 

**Regions in Ghana – Implications for** 

**Derived Digital Elevation Models over Two** 

**Hydrological and Environmental Modeling** 

*2Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente,* 

A Digital Elevation Model (DEM) refers to a quantitative model of a part of the earth's surface in digital form (Burrough and McDonnell, 1998). A DEM consists of either (1) a twodimensional array of numbers that represents the spatial distribution of elevations on a regular grid; (2) a set of *x*, *y*, and *z* coordinates for an irregular network of points; or (3) contour strings stored in the form of *x*, *y* coordinate pairs along each contour line of specified elevation (Walker and Willgoose, 1999). Though there are some disadvantages (Gao, 1997), regular grid DEMs are nowadays the most popular due to their computational

DEMs are useful for many purposes, and are an important precondition for many applications (Kim and Kang, 2001; Vadon, 2003). They are particularly useful in regions that are devoid of detailed topographic maps. DEMs have been found useful in many fields of study such as geomorphometry, as these are primarily related to surface processes such as landslides which can directly be depicted from a DEM (Hengl and Evans, 2009), archaeology as subtle changes due to previous human activity in the sub surface can be inferred on detailed DEMs (Menze *et al*., 2006), (commercial) forestry, e.g. height of trees and relation to preferred tree stem size (Simard *et al*., 2006), hydrology, like deriving drainage network and overland flow areas that contribute to (suspended) sediment loads (Lane *et al*., 1994) and analysis of glaciers (movement of glaciers using multi temporal DEM's) and glaciated terrains (change of glacier thickness by comparison of multi temporal DEM's) (Bishop *et al*., 2001). Thus for a whole range of different studies, typically topics of interest to geomorphologists, DEMs that provide a good representation of the terrain, are of utmost

DEMs can be generated using several methods, with varying degrees of accuracy and cost (Flood and Gutelius, 1997). Traditionally, they have been derived from contours that are extracted with photogrammetric techniques from aerial stereo photographs using the

efficiency. The use of DEM in this paper, therefore, refers to a regular gridded DEM.

importance as a starting point for further analysis.

**1. Introduction** 

Saudi Arabia: Evidence from Shear-wave Splitting and Seismic Anisotropy. Geology, October 2006 V. 34 no. 10 p. 869-872; doi: 10.1130/G22713.1.

