This interdisciplinary experts workshop, held in Valencia during June 1994, convened remote sensing specialists from various desciplines involved in desertification and land degradation monitoring, but also representatives of potential end-users, e.g. coming from national and supra-national agencies.

Desertification undoubtedly manifests itself through changing land surface conditions. From the perspective of some authors, it has also been seen as enhancing drought via 'biophysical feedback mechanisms' driven by albedo changes which are related to the destruction of vegetation and the degradation of soils. We find that remote sensing is often used to find out whether changed climatic forcing interacts with the desertification process, i.e. if and to which extent the changing energy and water fluxes at the land surface - atmosphere interface at different scales (local - mesoscale- global) allow to replace long-term averages of boundary conditions and input data by periodically updated land surface characteristics which regulate energy, momentum and mass exchange between land and atmosphere.