Monitoring land cover change and carbon stocks across Africa
The topic is open and also suitable for GEM students in track 3 – GEM for Ecosystems & Natural Resources.
Suggested elective courses:
- Forest monitoring and carbon stock estimation with multi-source remote sensing in the context of climate change
- Remote Sensing and Modelling of Primary Productivity and Plant Growth
- Environmental Monitoring with Satellite Image Time Series
Statistics, ecology and programming background/experience recommended.
HANPP estimates the actual biomass production (Net Primary Productivity or NPP) following anthropogenic intervention. HANPP is therefore an important climate mitigation tool that helps decision-makers to understand the drivers and mechanisms of land use-carbon dynamics. HANPP is typically derived from exhaustive national-level surveys. Recent developments in satellite image technology and methods however afford an opportunity to create rapid and reliable estimates of HANPP over large areas at low-cost for the first time.
The main aim of this topic is to estimate and characterize the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Productivity (HANPP) index for important landcover types across Africa: cropland, rangeland, and forest. HANPP can be estimated at high (20m) spatial resolution with Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery in case study regions where reference data is readily available (Ethiopia, Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda) or at moderate (300m) spatial resolution with MODIS and Sentinel-3 data across Africa. The topic can be broken down into three main tasks once the scale of observation is selected: (i) collect and process reference data (e.g., crop yield, forage quantity), satellite, and other relevant geospatial data; (ii) estimate HANPP and intermediate products (e.g., biomass, harvest index); and (iii) evaluate satellite-driven HANPP with standard statistical techniques. The research supports the ongoing European Space Agency LUISA project: https://eo4society.esa.int/projects/luisa-eo-africa/.
Kastner, T., Matej, S., Forrest, M., Gingrich, S., Haberl, H., Hickler, T., Krausmann, F., Lasslop, G., Niedertscheider, M., Plutzar, C., Schwarzmüller, F., Steinkamp, J., Erb, K.-H., 2022. Land use intensification increasingly drives the spatiotemporal patterns of the global human appropriation of net primary production in the last century. Glob. Change Biol. 28, 307–322. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15932