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Cited by 25Remote Sensing in AgricultureEcosystem dynamics and resilienceRangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

Environmental and Anthropogenic Degradation of Vegetation in the Sahel from 1982 to 2006

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Rishmawi, Khaldoun, Prince, Stephen·2016·Remote Sensing
DOI 10.3390/rs8110948
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Abstract

There is a great deal of debate on the extent, causes, and even the reality of land degradation in the Sahel. Investigations carried out before approximately 2000 using remote sensing data suggest widespread reductions in biological productivity, while studies extending beyond 2000 consistently reveal a net increase in vegetation production, strongly related to the recovery of rainfall following the extreme droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, and thus challenging the notion of widespread, long-term, subcontinental-scale degradation. Yet, the spatial variations in the rates of vegetation recovery are not fully explained by rainfall trends. It is hypothesized that, in addition to rainfall, other meteorological variables and human land use have contributed to vegetation dynamics. Throughout most of the Sahel, the interannual variability in growing season ΣNDVIgs (measured from satellites, used as a proxy of vegetation productivity) was strongly related to rainfall, humidity, and temperature (mean r2 = 0.67), but with rainfall alone was weaker (mean r2 = 0.41). The mean and upper 95th quantile (UQ) rates of change in ΣNDVIgs in response to climate were used to predict potential ΣNDVIgs—that is, the ΣNDVIgs expected in response to climate variability alone, excluding any anthropogenic effects. The differences between predicted and observed ΣNDVIgs were regressed against time to detect any long-term (positive or negative) trends in vegetation productivity. Over most of the Sahel, the trends did not significantly depart from what is expected from the trends in meteorological variables. However, substantial and spatially contiguous areas (~8% of the total area of the Sahel) were characterized by negative, and, in some areas, positive trends. To explore whether the negative trends were human-induced, they were compared with the available data of population density, land use, and land biophysical properties that are known to affect the susceptibility of land to degradation. The spatial variations in the trends of the residuals were partly related to soils and tree cover, but also to several anthropogenic pressures.

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  • Dryland areas have high climatic variability, with periods of dry and wet climates and corresponding cycles of greening and browning, most famously in the Sahel.

    “For instance, dryland areas have high climatic variability, with periods of dry and wet climates, and corresponding cycles of greening and browning, most famously in the Sahel region (29,30).”

    From Restoring Degraded Lands (2021) · cites this paper as [30]

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  • Restoring Degraded Lands

    Arneth, A., Olsson, L., Cowie, A., Erb, K.-H., Hurlbert, M., Kurz, W. A., Mirzabaev, A., & Rounsevell, M. D. A. (2021) · Annual Review of Environment and Resources · doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-012320-054809 · Cited by 106 · see citing works

    “For instance, dryland areas have high climatic variability, with periods of dry and wet climates, and corresponding cycles of greening and browning, most famously in the Sahel region (29, 30).”
    Background

Authors
Rishmawi, K., & Prince, S.
Affiliations
University of Maryland, College Park (US)
Corresponding author
Prince, Stephen
ORCID
Venue
Remote Sensing
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2016-11-13
Volume
8
Issue
11
Pages
948
ISSN
2072-4292 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3390/rs8110948
OpenAlex
W2549109348
Cited by
25
References
2
Citations by year
2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 4
FWCI
2.63
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Remote Sensing (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • University Libraries (University of Maryland) (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (University of Maryland College Park)
Funders
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (000420)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Remote Sensing in Agriculture
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Ecosystem dynamics and resilience
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law › Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology
Keywords
Sahel, land degradation, vegetation productivity, NDVI trends, rainfall variability, climate variability, anthropogenic land use, vegetation recovery, population density, tree cover, soil properties, vegetation dynamics

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 ›

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