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

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 degrees-15 degrees 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 regreening 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. (C) 2013 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Inc. (ISPRS) Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.