| Guyuan located in a Farming-pastoral zone in Hebei Province, is a fragile eco-environment area near the southeastern Inner Mongolia Plateau. It lies in a mixed zone between monsoon climate and continental climate and connects humid forests with desert. Because of its poor ecological conditions and simple landscape structures, Guyuan is prone to many natural disasters, such as droughts, sandstorms, hails, biological disasters, etc. Land degradation has become a very important environment issue affecting its economy and delaying the social sustainable development.Based on the external forces that lead to land degradation, this paper utilizes a rapid information-extraction technique to retrieve soil erosion, land desertification, and land salinization data and conducts comprehensive analyses and evaluations on the land degradation risk in Guyuan. According to the basic conditions of the study area, the capabilities of data acquisition, and remote sensing imagery processing techniques, we evaluate a set of approaches and models, identify different external forces that cause land degradation, and build a standard index system to classify land use/cover suitable for Guyuan, An evaluation index system of monitoring land degradation is also established based on remote sensing images and the characteristics of the data. We use our approaches and models to classify degradation into different levels and compare the results with the data collected from the local area and images from satellites. We also provide the local government with more effective methods for managing soil land.The results of our classification system show that 7,478,200 acres of land in Guyuan faces high risk of erosion, mainly located in Fengyuandian and Lianhuatan. Of high risk for salinization is 238000 acres in Jiulian and Shandianhe that accounts for 0.71% of the total area in Guyuan. Another 488,840 acres spread out through Guyuan county has high risk of desertification, accounting for 1.4% of it total area.
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