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Monitoring land cover change detection with NOAA-AVHRR and MODIS remotely sensed data in the North and West of Africa from 1982 to 2015

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Abstract

Mapping land cover changes (LCC) cover three decades over North and West Africa regions provides critical insights for the climate research that inspects the land-atmosphere interaction. LCC is a serious problem in the Earth science domain for this impacts the regional climate by modifying the distribution of terrestrial carbon stocking and roughness of the Earth’s surface. In this study, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) generated from advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) was used to produce a continuous set of annual land cover (LC) maps of land cover over North and West Africa between 1982 and 2015, based on the random forest classification. We used the MODIS land cover product (MCD12Q1) as a reference data for training the classifier. The result has validated using annual LC maps listed by time series and the spatio-temporal dynamics of land cover has illustrated over the last three decades. The comparison with Google Earth image 2015 shows that the overall accuracy of the simpler nine-class type of our land cover 2015 map is 76% and 2% higher than that of the MODIS map of the same year. The detection of changes indicated that over the last three decades, the urban and built-up, barren or sparsely vegetated, savannas and deciduous broadleaf forest have increased; in contrast, the open shrublands, woody savannas and water bodies have decreased.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the CAS Strategic Priority Research Program (No. XDA19030402) and the “Taishan Scholar” Project of Shandong Province and Key Basic Research Project of Shandong Natural Science Foundation of China (no. ZR2017ZB0422). We also thank the four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, China

    Malak Henchiri, Shahzad Ali, Wilson Kalisa, Sha Zhang & Yun Bai

  2. Remote Sensing Information and digital Earth Center, School of Computer Science and Technology, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, China

    Malak Henchiri, Shahzad Ali, Wilson Kalisa, Sha Zhang & Yun Bai

  3. Institut des Regions Arides (IRA), 4119, Medenine, Tunisia

    Bouajila Essifi

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  1. Malak Henchiri
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  2. Shahzad Ali
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  3. Bouajila Essifi
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  4. Wilson Kalisa
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  5. Sha Zhang
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Correspondence to Malak Henchiri.

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Henchiri, M., Ali, S., Essifi, B. et al. Monitoring land cover change detection with NOAA-AVHRR and MODIS remotely sensed data in the North and West of Africa from 1982 to 2015. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 5873–5889 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-07216-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-07216-1

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