Impact of climate variability and land cover dynamics on natural resources, management and conservation in West Africa (GLOWA Volta / BIOTA West Africa research network)

Especially in climate sensitive regions, where rainfed and irrigated agriculture is the main source of food security and income, concerns about the variability in rainfall, its temporal and spatial distribution, must be taken very seriously. This seems to be particularly true of West Africa where significant alterations in precipitation during the great Sahelian drought of the early 1970s and 1980s affected great parts of West Africa in terms of ecological, economic, and societal aspects. Analysing the complex reasons is still one of the major challenges for environmental scientific research.

In West Africa essential anthropogenically induced land cover changes took place during the past five decades. At the same time, great parts of the region suffered from a rainfall deficit at least for the last three decades. Results of this paper support the idea that regional variability in precipitation with regard to its temporal and spatial distribution is considerably linked to significant changes in vegetation cover. The environmental impact on socio-economy and natural biodiversity, however, remains ambiguous.

In frame of the GLOWA-Volta and BIOTA-West Africa scientific research networks funded by the Federal German Ministry for Science and Education (BMBF) a multi-scale monitoring concept was designed, combining most suitable and advantageous features of remote sensing and bioclimatic ground observations in order to examine the following focal points: a) monitoring of large scale vegetation, hydrologic and biogeophysical dynamics; b) change detection of vegetation and land surface characteristics (particularly human induced changes of different degradation intensity); and c) the importance of changes within biosphere – atmosphere interactions.