Safe Sowing Windows for Smallholder Farmers in West Africa in the Context of Climate Variability

Climate variability poses great challenges to food security in West Africa, a region heavily dependent on rainfall for farming. Identifying sowing strategies that minimize yield losses for farmers in the region is crucial to securing their livelihood. In this paper, we investigate three sowing strategies to assess their ability to identify safe...

The Potential of Deep Learning for Satellite Rainfall Detection over Data-Scarce Regions, the West African Savanna

Food and economic security in West Africa rely heavily on rainfed agriculture and are threatened by climate change and demographic growth. Accurate rainfall information is therefore crucial to tackling these challenges. Particularly, information about the occurrence and length of droughts as well as the onset date of the rainy season is...

The Role of Water Vapor Observations in Satellite Rainfall Detection Highlighted by a Deep Learning Approach

West African food systems and rural socio-economics are based on rainfed agriculture, which makes society highly vulnerable to rainfall uncertainty and frequent floods and droughts. Reliable rainfall information is currently missing. There is a sparse and uneven rain gauge distribution and, despite continuous efforts, rainfall satellite products...

Spatiotemporal Patterns in Land Use/Land Cover Observed by Fusion of Multi-Source Fine-Resolution Data in West Africa

Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) change is a major global concern and a topic of scientific debate. In West Africa, the key trend among the changes of the past few years is the loss of natural vegetation related to changes in different LULC categories, e.g., water bodies, wetland, and bare soil. However, not all detected changes in these LULC...

Quantifying spatial reallocation of land use/land cover categories in West Africa

Past Land Use Land Cover (LULC) transitions analysis at the sub-continental scale of West Africa revealed spatial reallocation, i.e., simultaneous losses and gains of the LULC categories at different locations. We applied the component analysis approach to separate the total change into three major components, i.e., quantity (net change),...

Modeling the underlying drivers of natural vegetation occurrence in west africa with binary logistic regression method

The occurrence of natural vegetation at a given time is determined by interplay of multiple drivers. The effects of several drivers, e.g., geomorphology, topography, climate variability, accessibility, demographic indicators, and changes in human activities on the occurrence of natural vegetation in the severe drought periods and, prior to...

Mapping land use land cover transitions at different spatiotemporal scales in West Africa

Post‐classification change detection was applied to examine the nature of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) transitions in West Africa in three time intervals (1975–2000, 2000–2013, and 1975– 2013). Detailed analyses at hotspots coupled with comparison of LULC transitions in the humid and arid regions were undertaken. Climate and anthropic drivers...

Gap-filling of daily streamflow time series using Direct Sampling in various hydroclimatic settings

Complete hydrological time series are necessary for water resources management and modeling. This can be challenging in data scarce environments where data gaps are ubiquitous. In many applications, repetitive gaps can have unfortunate consequences including ineffective model calibration, unreliable timing of peak flows, and biased statistics....

Regional vegetation water effects on satellite soil moisture estimations for West Africa

Soil moisture information is a vital parameter for water resources planning and food production. In particular for West Africa, where income largely depends on rainfed agriculture, reliable information on available soil water is required for modeling and prediction. Over large areas and, specifically, for data scarce regions, satellite soil...

Hydrotope-Based Protocol to Determine Average Soil Moisture Over Large Areas for Satellite Calibration and Validation With Results From an Observation Campaign in the Volta Basin, West Africa

In West Africa, which is an extremely moisturelimited region, soil water information plays a vital role in hydrologic and meteorologic modeling for improved water resource planning and food security. Recent and upcoming satellite missions, such as SMOS and MetOp, hold promise for the regional observation of soil moisture. The resolution of the...

Planejamento Urbano, Habitação e autoconstrução: Experiências com urbanização de bairros na Guiné-Bissau