New papers on the impact of changed rainfall patterns on savanna vegetation

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 …

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Why our research matters

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 …

New Publication in Nature Sustainability

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 …

How does conflict affect land use? New publication!

Population and Environment in the Middle East

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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Expanding the study area: from West Africa to South China

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 …

Our research in the media

Our article in Nature Ecology & Evolution got some media attention, both in the Danish and the international press. Africa has become greener in the last 20 years at Science Nordic Global greening may soak up less carbon dioxide than projected at New Scientist The forests won’t fix our CO2 problem — in fact, they’ll …

Publishing in the open access journal Remote Sensing (MDPI)

With our last article published, we are closing the special issue on land degradation for the open access journal Remote Sensing and I want to share some experiences here. In total, 24 articles were submitted, 13 of them were published, 6 rejected without going to review, and 5 were rejected after review. So we have …