The impact of deforestation on rainfall in Africa
A data-driven assessment
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15547464 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Confidence Duku (0000-0002-1670-3451, Wageningen University & Research, corresponding author), Laura Hein (0000-0002-4651-2875, Wageningen University & Research), Lars Hein |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 064044-064044 |
| Publication date | 2021-04-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Research Letters (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1748-9326 • E-ISSN: 1748-9326 |
| Publisher | IOP Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1088/1748-9326/abfcfb |
| OpenAlex | W3157399840 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 33 |
Forests play an important role in maintaining rainfall patterns worldwide by recycling water back to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration. We present a novel spatiotemporal data-driven model and assessment of the impacts of various deforestation scenarios on rainfall patterns in sub-Saharan Africa, where rainfed agriculture is the main source of income and provides food for a large part of the population. Our model is based on the convolutional long short term memory neural network and uses a combination of climate and vegetation time-series data to predict rainfall and to perform simulation experiments. Our results show that complete deforestation (i.e. conversion of all humid forests to short grasslands) would greatly reduce rainfall magnitude in the deforested areas. Above the equator, the large majority of areas not currently forested would also receive less rainfall. However, complete deforestation would slightly increase rainfall in some parts of Southern Africa and decrease it in other parts. The impacts of partial deforestation also differ across Africa. In West Africa, even moderate tree cover loss (i.e. 30%) reduces rainfall magnitude whereas in Central and Southern Africa, a threshold of 70% tree cover loss is required to reduce rainfall magnitude. Deforestation of remaining humid rainforest areas is thus likely to dramatically affect rainfed agriculture across the continent, in particular in the maize-based cropping systems north of the equator
Agriculture · Agroforestry · Climate change · Climatology · Deforestation (computer science · Evapotranspiration · Geography · Population · Rainforest · Vegetation (pathology · Climate variability and models · Environmental Science · Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics · Remote Sensing in Agriculture · Ecology · Geology
SciPy 1.0
The ERA‐Interim reanalysis
Dynamics of global forest area
Can sub-Saharan Africa feed itself?
Local cooling and warming effects of forests based on satellite observations
Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems
Long Short-Term Memory
High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change
Forest loss and Borneo’s climate
Deforestation risk due to commodity crop expansion in sub-Saharan Africa
Trees, forests and water
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |