The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Drivers of woody plant encroachment over Africa
Open accessAbstract
While global deforestation induced by human land use has been quantified, the drivers and extent of simultaneous woody plant encroachment (WPE) into open areas are only regionally known. WPE has important consequences for ecosystem functioning, global carbon balances and human economies. Here we report, using high-resolution satellite imagery, that woody vegetation cover over sub-Saharan Africa increased by 8% over the past three decades and that a diversity of drivers, other than CO 2, were able to explain 78% of the spatial variation in this trend. A decline in burned area along with warmer, wetter climates drove WPE, although this has been mitigated in areas with high population growth rates, and high and low extremes of herbivory, specifically browsers. These results confirm global greening trends, thereby bringing into question widely held theories about declining terrestrial carbon balances and desert expansion. Importantly, while global drivers such as climate and CO 2 may enhance the risk of WPE, managing fire and herbivory at the local scale provides tools to mitigate continental WPE.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Breiman, L. (2001) · Machine Learning · doi:10.1023/a:1010933404324 · Cited by 133,538
Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas
Hijmans, R. J., Cameron, S. E., Parra, J. L., Jones, P. G., & Jarvis, A. (2005) · International Journal of Climatology · doi:10.1002/joc.1276 · Cited by 19,825
Google Earth Engine: Planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone
Gorelick, N., Hancher, M., Dixon, M., Ilyushchenko, S., Thau, D., & Moore, R. (2017) · Remote Sensing of Environment · doi:10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.031 · Cited by 14,719
Global Consequences of Land Use
Foley, J. A., DeFries, R., Asner, G. P., Barford, C., Bonan, G., Carpenter, S. R., Chapin, F. S., Coe, M. T., Daily, G. C., Gibbs, H. K., et al. (2005) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1111772 · Cited by 13,272
Red and photographic infrared linear combinations for monitoring vegetation
Tucker, C. J. (1979) · Remote Sensing of Environment · doi:10.1016/0034-4257(79)90013-0 · Cited by 11,754
High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change
Hansen, M. C., Potapov, P. V., Moore, R., Hancher, M., Turubanova, S. A., Tyukavina, A., Thau, D., Stehman, S. V., Goetz, S. J., Loveland, T. R., et al. (2013) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1244693 · Cited by 11,704
Dormann, C. F., Elith, J., Bacher, S., Buchmann, C., Carl, G., Carré, G., Marquéz, J. R. G., Gruber, B., Lafourcade, B., Leitão, P. J., et al. (2013) · Ecography · doi:10.1111/j.1600-0587.2012.07348.x · Cited by 9,998
The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission
Farr, T. G., Rosen, P. A., Caro, E., Crippen, R., Duren, R., Hensley, S., Kobrick, M., Paller, M., Rodriguez, E., Roth, L., et al. (2007) · Reviews of Geophysics · doi:10.1029/2005rg000183 · Cited by 8,927
Terrestrial ecoregions of the world: a new map of life on Earth
Olson, D. M., Dinerstein, E., Wikramanayake, E. D., Burgess, N. D., Powell, G. V. N., Underwood, E. C., D'amico, J. A., Itoua, I., Strand, H. E., Morrison, J. C., et al. (2001) · BioScience · doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0933:teotwa]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 8,488
A soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI)
Huete, A. R. (1988) · Remote Sensing of Environment · doi:10.1016/0034-4257(88)90106-x · Cited by 7,948
Cited by
Biogeography of global drylands
Maestre, F. T., Benito, B. M., Berdugo, M., Concostrina‐Zubiri, L., Delgado‐Baquerizo, M., Eldridge, D. J., Guirado, E., Gross, N., Kéfi, S., Le Bagousse‐Pinguet, Y., et al. (2021) · New Phytologist · doi:10.1111/nph.17395 · Cited by 394
Feedback in tropical forests of the Anthropocene
Flores, B. M., & Staal, A. (2022) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.16293 · Cited by 59
Zhang, L., & Wang, Y. (2025) · Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility · doi:10.1111/beer.12659 · Cited by 4
Metadata
- Authors
- Venter, Z. S., Cramer, M. D., & Hawkins, H.-J.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2018-06-11
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 2272-2272
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2805520784
- Cited by
- 366
- References
- 77
- FWCI
- 20.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Drivers of woody plant encroachment over Africa. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41467-018-04616-8
- The paper
- Venter, Z. S., Cramer, M. D., & Hawkins, H.-J. (2018). Drivers of woody plant encroachment over Africa. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04616-8
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
