Sahara and Sahel: a surprising number of trees inhabit the region
A CNRS study has just shown that trees are much more numerous than what was believed in the Sahel.
© AFP / PASCAL GUYOT
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
When we speak of the Sahelian zone, of sub-Saharan Africa, we imagine a desert zone without vegetation and especially without trees.
However, a study by the CNRS has just shown that there are many more trees there than what we thought.
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Observing a region as large as four and a half times the size of France, at a resolution of 50 cm2 to count trees, had never been done until this study of satellite photos from NASA,
by a CNRS team
.
Surprise!
Scientists have detected almost 2 billion trees in this space of more than 1 million km2, which gives on average between 13 and 14 trees per hectare.
Useful data in the context of climate change, as Jérôme Chave, ecologist at the CNRS explains.
"
This census makes it possible to take stock of the amount of carbon that the terrestrial biosphere stores, and that is really important for understanding the carbon cycle, the fact that our greenhouse gas emissions are increasing but the biosphere is able to buffer, in part, these emissions.
And a good knowledge of the biosphere starts with a good knowledge of where the vegetation is.
Today, we describe the vegetation as large regions, the tropical forest, for example, but we make maps that are very, very simplistic.
We have forests where there are trees and where there are ecosystems that are non-forests where we imagine that there are no trees and in fact, the reality is much more complex than that
” , he emphasizes.
If States want to develop positive strategies for the climate, it is essential to know precisely the state of the vegetation.
Now it remains for researchers to include these new data in predictive climate models.
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