Identification of environmental anomaly hot spots in West Africa from time series of NDVI and rainfall

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2013.01.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Studies of the impact of human activity on vegetation dynamics of the Sahelian belt of Africa have been recently re-invigorated by new scientific findings that highlighted the primary role of climate in the drought crises of the 1970s–1980s. Time series of satellite observations revealed a re-greening of the Sahelian belt that indicates no noteworthy human effect on vegetation dynamics at sub continental scale from the 1980s to late 1990s. However, several regional/local crises related to natural resources occurred in the last decades despite the re-greening thus underlying that more detailed studies are needed. In this study we used time-series (1998–2010) of SPOT–VGT NDVI and FEWS–RFE rainfall estimates to analyse vegetation – rainfall correlation and to map areas of local environmental anomalies where significant vegetation variations (increase/decrease) are not fully explained by seasonal changes of rainfall. Some of these anomalous zones (hot spots) were further analysed with higher resolution images Landsat TM/ETM+ to evaluate the reliability of the identified anomalous behaviour and to provide an interpretation of some example hot spots. The frequency distribution of the hot spots among the land cover classes of the GlobCover map shows that increase in vegetation greenness is mainly located in the more humid southern part and close to inland water bodies where it is likely to be related to the expansion/intensification of irrigated agricultural activities. On the contrary, a decrease in vegetation greenness occurs mainly in the northern part (12°–15°N) in correspondence with herbaceous vegetation covers where pastoral and cropping practices are often critical due to low and very unpredictable rainfall. The results of this study show that even if a general positive re-greening due to increased rainfall is evident for the entire Sahel, some local anomalous hot spots exist and can be explained by human factors such as population growth whose level reaches the ecosystem carrying capacity as well as population displacement leading to vegetation recovery.

Introduction

The West African Sahelian belt witnessed a dramatic food crisis in the 1970s–1980s, which was caused by prolonged drought and was locally exacerbated by socio economic instability. The progressive environmental degradation and food shortage during those years have stimulated the international attention towards Sahel, which materialised in the United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNCOD), organised in 1977 and 1978. The conference has launched a debate, which is still open, on the causes of drought and its impact on food security for the local population. The scientific interest focused on (a) seeking climatic or anthropogenic driving factors for the extended drought and (b) assessing its impact on the environment and the agro-ecosystems (Herrmann et al., 2005). For what concerns the interpretation of the causes of drought, there are two different schools of thought: one adheres to the hypothesis of a human-induced drought (Ibrahim, 1978) and the other one to the hypothesis that drought was caused by climatic variability on which human have a minor role (Nicholson et al., 1998, Olsson et al., 2005). These opposing hypotheses derived from the difficulty in identifying root causes of long term climate fluctuations. Some authors point to the relationship between rainfall and the anomalies of the ocean surface temperature, which is a phenomenon similar to El Niño occurring in the Pacific Ocean (Nicholson and Grist, 2001, Giannini et al., 2003), whereas others point to the relation between the monsoon season and the cold temperatures in the southern part of the Atlantic (Brooks, 2004).

Similarly, investigations on the consequences and the impact of drought have seen different interpretations. In the late 1980s, Lamprey (1988) stated that the Sahelian region was witnessing an “irreversible and progressive desertification”, but more recent studies based on satellite data show an increase in vegetation cover since the mid-1980s (Eklundh and Olsson, 2003), which is correlated to an increase in large-scale precipitation (Herrmann et al., 2005, Heumann et al., 2007). This phenomenon, commonly referred to as “greening” or “re-greening” has been interpreted as a recovery from the great Sahelian drought of the 1960s and 1970s (Anyamba and Tucker, 2005, Olsson et al., 2005, Giannini et al., 2008). Although the extent of “greening” has not yet been established with ground data, it questions previous theories about the “irreversible damage inflicted on the ecosystem Sahel” (Dregne, 1986, Middleton and Thomas, 1997). New technologies, like remote sensing, have allowed the scientific community to further analyse the climatic phenomena in their spatial and temporal dimensions and their relation with vegetation dynamics. Herrmann et al. (2005) compared trends of rainfall and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a widely used proxy of vegetation productivity, and found a general increase of vegetation abundance in the Sahel between 1982 and 2003, thus refusing the presence of a large-scale irreversible desertification. The same authors pointed out that, locally, the NDVI-rainfall relation differs from the expected trend, thus suggesting that other factors have driven vegetation regrowth such as the improvement of agricultural practises. Huber et al. (2011) highlighted that differences in vegetation patterns are also related to water availability into the soil and not only to rainfall quantity. Some areas resulted especially interesting, because “…the NDVI trends […] are opposed to those observed in the rainfall time series”, underlining local anomalous response of vegetation to changes in the precipitation amount. In particular, the authors found that Western Sahel (Senegal) shows a significant greening trend despite stable rainfall while Eastern Sahel (Sudan) shows an opposite behaviour.

Several studies based on time series of satellite data and, where available, on ground data, confirmed the dynamics of the Sahelian ecosystem and their tendency to change with time, although there is no general agreement on the entity of such changes and on the major driving factors (Herrmann et al., 2005). Capecchi et al. (2008) verified the positive effect of increased rainfall on crop production and especially on the production of millet between 1986 and 2000. However, due to the lack of detailed information, it is hard to assess the real extent of the “greening” phenomenon in terms of ecosystem production. For example, the herbaceous savanna of the Sahel has shown a strong greening when analysed with satellite data, however in field information indicates that locally the vegetation composition of these systems is changing. FAO indicates that rangelands have shown a phytosociological response of grassland to prolonged droughts: loss of perennial herbaceous species as Cymbopogon giganteus and Aristida sieberiana and the expansion of species with shorter phenological cycle (thus more resistant to drought) such as Cenchrus biflorus and Aristida funiculata. In conclusion, a global greening could be due not only to ecosystem recovery but also to changes of herbaceous species composition. Some of these species are also palatable to animals but their low productivity (about 400 kg/ha compared with 2000 kg/ha of perennial herbaceous species) affects agro-pastoral activities (Geesing and Djibo, 2001). If a general regional “greening” is highlighted by time series of satellite data, it does not necessarily imply a recovery of the carrying capacity of these ecosystems. Several authors (Herrmann et al., 2005, Seaquist et al., 2009, Fensholt and Rasmussen, 2011) state that it is not possible to exclude local processes of desertification and degradation and therefore it is necessary to conduct analyses at a finer spatial scale to highlight possible anomalous situations.

This study aims to identify hot spots of environmental anomalies where vegetation dynamics are not fully explained by rainfall variability suggesting that other factors are interfering with the phenomena. We analysed the correlation between SPOT–VGT NDVI and FEWS–RFE (Famine Early Warning Systems Network – Rain Fall Estimates) over the period 1998–2010 and we studied the temporal dynamics of NDVI to identify areas where vegetation presents a statistically significant change over the 13-year period. The spatial distribution of these hot spots of environmental anomaly is analysed as a function of the land cover and it is discussed with other ancillary information. Finally, a set of multi-temporal Landsat TM images, with higher spatial resolution (30 m) compare to 1 km SPOT–VGT, is used to evaluate the method and to interpret locally the results.

Section snippets

Study area

The study area covers sub-Saharan West Africa between 4°N and 18°N of latitude and −18°E and 25°E of longitude (Fig. 1). The area of interest is the Sahel: a transition zone, which is marked by a steep north–south gradient in mean annual rainfall, and is located between the Sahara desert and the sub-humid tropical savannas. The climate of the Sahel is characterised by a strong seasonality and variability of rainfall, with a long dry season in winter and a short summer rainy period. The effect

Satellite data time series

Satellite data are particularly suitable, and often represent the only available data source, for the analysis of large scale phenomena such as the vegetation dynamics of the sub-Saharan West Africa. The analysis of Sahelian vegetation dynamics showed that the boundaries of this area may change even 150 km a year following rainfall pattern (Tucker and Nicholson, 1999). Thus, the analysis of desertification and land degradation processes can be carried out only with long-term spatial analysis at

Pre-processing and standardization of the time series

The autocorrelation (or serial correlation) of temporal data is a well know problem that can strongly bias the detection of trend in NDVI time series analysis (Eklundh, 1998, de Beurs and Henebry, 2005). de Jong and de Bruin (2012) underlined that the managing of time series has to be done with care in order to avoid spurious results; the serial correlation affects the null hypothesis of a trend test producing false rejections that leads to an overestimation of temporal trend detection even

Spatial correlation and temporal dynamics analysis

The autocorrelation analysis conducted on ∑NDVI time series, before performing the subsequent statistical analysis, indicated that, when lag-1 to lag-3 condition is considered, all time series resulted temporally independent (i.e. no autocorrelation). Spatial distribution of the Kendal tau rank correlation coefficient between ∑NDVI and Y-Rain is shown in Fig. 2a and areas where correlation is significant are presented in Fig. 2b. The Sahelian belt shows high positive correlation (blue regions)

Conclusions

This study performs a preliminary screening at regional scale using time series of 1 km satellite data in order to identify local anomalous environmental hot spots where changes in vegetation cover are likely to occur. The information that is obtained by this study is particularly relevant for strategic orientation of environmental resource management, not only at national level, but also for regional and continental institutions such as ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) and the

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as a part of the GEOLAND-2 project (www.gmes-geoland.info), which is a Collaborative Project (2008–2012) funded by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme (Project Number 218795). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the research results presented in this paper.

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