There is a pressing need for an objective, repeatable, systematic and spatially explicit measure of land degradation. In northeastern South Africa, there are large areas of the former homelands that are widely regarded as degraded. A time-series of seasonally integrated I km, Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data was used to compare degraded rangelands [mapped by the National Land Cover (NLC) using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery] to nondegraded rangelands within the same land capability units (LCUs). Keywords: AVHRR, Advanced very high resolution radiometer, NDVI, Normalized difference vegetation index, LCU, Land capacity units, SigmaNDVI, Human-induced land degradation, Rangelands - South Africa, Environmental sciences.