SWEA-Dataveg: A vegetation database for sub-Saharan Africa

Álvarez, Miguel; Curran, Michael; Malombe, Itambo

doi:10.3897/vcs/2021/64911

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…In sub-Saharan Africa as elsewhere, documenting and classifying vegetation has become a vital task to enable the proper assessment of endangered ecosystems [ 11 ]. Ethiopia is rich in biodiversity, topographical complexity and climate variability which jointly results in different vegetation types [ 12 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing vegetation cover and valuing ecosystem services in southwestern Ethiopia: Implications for conservation

Yilma,

Yitay

2024

PLoS ONE

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The Bench-Sheko zone, parts of the Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity Hotspot, is characterized by its rich biodiversity. However, recent reductions in vegetation cover have drawn concern, highlighting the critical role of remote sensing in monitoring these alterations is critical. Furthermore, this study evaluates the economic value of the ecosystem services rendered by the diverse types of vegetation cover class in the area. The classification of vegetation types and measuring their ecosystem benefits are crucial for monitoring vegetation and analyzing land cover changes. estimating the value of ecosystem services is vital for environmental impact assessments, cost-benefit analyses, and creating payment schemes for these natural services. For the vegetation cover map, it uses Sentinel-2 satellite data and a Random Forest classifier using Google Earth Engine. Based on a properly chosen reference, ecosystem service assessment approaches include benefit transfer, direct market value, and the social cost of carbon. The results highlight the vegetation classes’ enormous value and the services they offer. The largest value for Supporting Services (2829.3 USD ha⁻1yr⁻1) is found in the Remnant Forest, which makes up 30.98% of the total area. With the highest value for both cultural services (2847.7 USD ha⁻1yr⁻1) and regulatory services (5063.9 USD ha⁻1yr⁻1), the wetlands, which make up 4.35% of the total area, stand out. The total annual value of all ecosystem services provided by all vegetation classes is estimated to be 2.089 billion USD. When paired with methods for tracking and assessing changes in vegetation cover over time, high-resolution satellite images and precise classification algorithms can offer insightful information on the condition of the environment and support informed decision-making. In order to evaluate and convey to society and policymakers the advantages of vegetation cover, the value of ecosystem services is essential.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing vegetation cover and valuing ecosystem services in southwestern Ethiopia: Implications for conservation

Yilma,

Yitay

2024

PLoS ONE

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Major distribution shifts are projected for key rangeland grasses under a high-emission scenario in East Africa at the end of the 21st century

Messmer,

Eckert,

Torre-Marin Rando

et al. 2024

Commun Earth Environ

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Grassland landscapes are important ecosystems in East Africa, providing habitat and grazing grounds for wildlife and livestock and supporting pastoralism, an essential part of the agricultural sector. Since future grassland availability directly affects the future mobility needs of pastoralists and wildlife, we aim to model changes in the distribution of key grassland species under climate change. Here we combine a global and regional climate model with a machine learning-based species distribution model to understand the impact of regional climate change on different key grass species. The application of a dynamical downscaling step allows us to capture the fine-scale effects of the region’s complex climate, its variability and future changes. We show that the co-occurrence of the analysed grass species is reduced in large parts of eastern Africa, and particularly in the Turkana region, under the high-emission RCP8.5 scenario for the last 30 years of the 21st century. Our results suggest that future climate change will alter the natural resource base, with potentially negative impacts on pastoralism and wildlife in East Africa.

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sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open‐access, global dataset of vegetation plots

Sabatini¹,

Lenoir²,

Hattab³

et al. 2021

Global Ecol. Biogeogr.

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Motivation Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots have been recorded, most are not available to the global research community. A recent initiative, called ‘sPlot’, compiled the first global vegetation plot database, and continues to grow and curate it. The sPlot database, however, is extremely unbalanced spatially and environmentally, and is not open‐access. Here, we address both these issues by (a) resampling the vegetation plots using several environmental variables as sampling strata and (b) securing permission from data holders of 105 local‐to‐regional datasets to openly release data. We thus present sPlotOpen, the largest open‐access dataset of vegetation plots ever released. sPlotOpen can be used to explore global diversity at the plant community level, as ground truth data in remote sensing applications, or as a baseline for biodiversity monitoring. Main types of variable contained Vegetation plots (n = 95,104) recording cover or abundance of naturally co‐occurring vascular plant species within delimited areas. sPlotOpen contains three partially overlapping resampled datasets (c. 50,000 plots each), to be used as replicates in global analyses. Besides geographical location, date, plot size, biome, elevation, slope, aspect, vegetation type, naturalness, coverage of various vegetation layers, and source dataset, plot‐level data also include community‐weighted means and variances of 18 plant functional traits from the TRY Plant Trait Database. Spatial location and grain Global, 0.01–40,000 m². Time period and grain 1888–2015, recording dates. Major taxa and level of measurement 42,677 vascular plant taxa, plot‐level records. Software format Three main matrices (.csv), relationally linked.

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SWEA-Dataveg: A vegetation database for sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 7 publications

References 16 publications

Assessing vegetation cover and valuing ecosystem services in southwestern Ethiopia: Implications for conservation

Assessing vegetation cover and valuing ecosystem services in southwestern Ethiopia: Implications for conservation

Major distribution shifts are projected for key rangeland grasses under a high-emission scenario in East Africa at the end of the 21st century

sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open‐access, global dataset of vegetation plots

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