Recent woody vegetation trends in Sahel

Our new paper looks at recent dynamics in woody vegetation in Sahel and finds some interesting patterns which are mainly controlled by human population density. Martin Brandt, Pierre Hiernaux, Kjeld Rasmussen, Cheikh Mbow, Laurent Kergoat, Torbern Tagesson, Yahaya Ibrahim, Abdoulaye Wele, Compton J. Tucker, Rasmus Fensholt. Assessing woody vegetation trends in Sahelian drylands using MODIS …

Woody vegetation and land cover changes in the Sahel of Mali (1967–2011)

Another very interesting publication using object based methods to detect single trees on very high resolution imagery is online.Raphael Spiekermann, Martin Brandt, Cyrus Samimi, Woody vegetation and land cover changes inthe Sahel of Mali (1967–2011), International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, Volume 34, February 2015, Pages 113-121.It can be downloaded for free until …

Climate, Environment and Vegetation in the West African Sahel

Here's a press release summarizing parts of my PhD. It was released by the University of Bayreuth (http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/pressemitteilungen-html/121-Sahelzone/index.html) and IDW (http://idwf.de/-CREwAA) in German (thanks to Pierre Gosselin for translating). As I got many emails on this, we want to make clear at this point that we do not aim to question climate change with this article! It shall give background …

Local Vegetation Trends in the Sahel of Mali and Senegal Using Long Time Series FAPAR Satellite Products and Field Measurement (1982–2010)

We finally published an article dealing with local vegetation trends in the Sahel and data quality of long term time series (GEOV1 and GIMMS3g). It is published in the open access journal "Remote Sensing" and can be downloaded for free: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/6/3/2408 Brandt, Martin; Verger, Aleixandre; Diouf, Abdoul A.; Baret, Frédéric; Samimi, Cyrus. 2014. "Local Vegetation …

50 years of woody vegetation and land-cover change in the Sahel of Mali

The Sahel region has often been acclaimed as one of the “hot spots” of environmental change. Degradation of environmental conditions was accelerated by droughts and an overall decrease in precipitation. The resulting loss of woody vegetation cover was often considered as irreversible desertification. Recent findings, based on small-scaled analyses of satellite images, show an increase …

Detecting environmental change using time series, high resolution imagery and field work – a case study in the Sahel of Mali

Climatic changes and population pressure have caused major environmental change in the Sahel during the last fifty years. Many studies use coarse resolution NDVI time series such as GIMMS to detect environmental trends; however explanations for these trends remain largely unknown.We suggest a five-step methodology for the validation of trends with a case study on the Dogon Plateau, …