Land degradation addressed by satellite based vegetation phenological trends over Africa:preliminary results

摘要

Land degradation is the reduction of the capacity of land to sustain its ecosystem functions and services that support society and development. In this study we derive phenological indices from time series of Spot VEGETATON images. For the African continent, we illustrate that such metrics show observable trends that can help explaining the state and evolution of vegetative land cover due to climatic and/or anthropogenic influences and can be considered a large scale proxy adding to assessment of land degradation.