ИСТИНА

Regionalization is usually defined as a procedure of identification of integral territorial systems and, unlike typology, it concentrates the attention of a researcher on the distinctions between them, on the determination of their identity. Geoecological regionalization is a rather new type of that procedure aimed at the identification of the areas of similar environmental situations. This type of regionalization poses a specific problem of the reasonable balance between the use of various criteria of regionalization defined on objective and subjective approaches to the identification of individual areas. Geoecological regionalization of Africa was based on analysis of natural and historical-cultural features and the level of anthropogenic impact on landscapes. As a result 52 individual geoecological areas were identified according to the combination of the leading factors of regionalization (natural, civilization, ethnolinguistic, social-economic). The resulting regionalization was verified using the group of methodologies offered by the ArcMap software package for modeling of the complex spatially distributed phenomena connected with the analysis of polytypic and diverse input data. Taking into account specific features of anthropogenic impact on the territory of the African continent, and also the availability of information sources, we gave the preference to the indicators characterizing agricultural impact, and the impact of the urbanized areas. The general logical model of geoecological regionalization was divided into thematic submodels: natural factors of area formation (1), anthropogenic pressure on landscapes (2) and geoecological state of landscapes and their separate components (3).The result of the geoinformation modeling reflects the differentiation of the African territory in terms of three groups of factors: natural features, anthropogenic load and the state of environment. Considering the total character of areas, it is necessary to notice that they are really more diverse if the level of their generalization is higher. The diversity is the highest within savanna and woodland zones on the plains of Sahel and Sudan where the mosaic of population density, forms of anthropogenic influence and geoenvironmental pressure is the most pronounced. For each region on the data of MODIS global land cover the properties of land-use/land-cover dynamics were determined.