GIS User Group

April 9, 2008

Use of remote sensing and GIS to study climatic and human determinants of land cover change in semi-arid West Africa

Stefanie Herrmann (ASP) gave a talk about use of remote sensing and GIS to study climatic and human determinants of land cover change in semi-arid West Africa. Stefanie gave an overview of her previous and current work on vegetation change – desertification and greening – in the Sahel region. Within the framework of the debate about desertification, spatio-temporal analyses of time series of remotely sensed monthly vegetation index data and precipitation estimates were performed at a coarse resolution across the entire region in order to determine trends and the relationships between the two variables. With the aim of better characterizing the nature of the observed vegetation changes, further finer resolution analysis of the rainfall-vegetation relationship is currently being carried out for a 5ºx 5º subset of the region using a range of vegetation phenological (= seasonality) parameters and rainfall variables. Future work is planned to incorporate the human dimension, that is, driving forces of decision making on land use and land management.

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