Land use policies have turned southern China into one of the most intensively managed forest regions in the world, with actions maximizing forest cover on soils with marginal agricultural potential while concurrently increasing livelihoods and mitigating climate change. Based on satellite observations, here we show that diverse land use changes in southern China have increased … Continue reading New study in Nature Communications
We have a new paper online showing aboveground biomass carbon fluxes in the global tropics using the SMOS L-VOD data. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-019-0478-9
Climate change includes not only changed rainfall amounts, but also the distribution, intensity and frequency of heavy rainfall events changes. This leads to a a generally decreased relationship between annual rainfall and vegetation production. Also, herbaceous and woody vegetation benefit differently from changed rainfall patterns. We have now 2 new studies online, exploring how changed … Continue reading New papers on the impact of changed rainfall patterns on savanna vegetation
At some point, many scientists working in geographic fields may have asked themselves if there is any "use" in the work we do. The main aim of a study should not be to get it published in a high impact journal but to share research results with as many people as possible. However, here comes … Continue reading Why our research matters
Now this is something really cool: -We have a paper in the first ever issue of the new journal Nature Sustainability -Both the cover of the first issue and the website banner are my photos I shot last summer in Southern China -The paper is the thesis of my girlfriend and it is the cover … Continue reading New Publication in Nature Sustainability
In November 2015, me and a colleague (Michael Degerald, visit his blog here) asked the question: how is agriculture affected in the areas seized by the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Da’esh)? We couldn’t find much information to answer our question, so we decided to investigate it ourselves.
At first we wanted to look at changes in productivity indicated by satellite measured greenness, but later we decided to go a step deeper and look at land use activity as an indicator of land abandonment (as I had done in a previous publication). As the project moved on, more people became interested, and eventually three more co-authors were added: Petter Pilesjö (Lund University), Martin Brandt and Alexander Prishcepov (both from Copenhagen University).
Together, we conducted a land use classification based on NDVI data from MODIS based on the seasonality of the land surface. We distinguished between single cropped cropland…
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People who know me and my research know that I am in love with the Sahel and its people, and this will never change. However, I recently had the chance to expand my research area from the semi-arid Sahel to humid China, more specifically the South China Karst. I spent around 4 months in China … Continue reading Expanding the study area: from West Africa to South China
