Monitoring cropland encroachment in pastoral zones.
Agriculture and livestock are economic and social pillars in many African countries, especially those in the Sahel. Livelihoods around grazing or cultivation require large areas of land and can often result in competition, or in many cases conflict, over land use. Extensions of agricultural land into grazing areas and herd movements into cultivated areas can exacerbate existing tensions on both sides.
Understanding tensions around land-use is critical to effective resource management and conflict mitigation. In order to better follow these dynamics, our team has been working on innovative methods to map cropland encroachment into pastoral areas using high resolution satellite imagery. These methods allow researchers to analyze year over year changes in land use.
Our approach offers the following features:
- Low cost by using open source data
- Cloud native solutions
- A long archive of satellite imagery
- A methodology specifically adapted to the unique Sahelian landscape
These methods have been deployed by our team in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso with the following results:
- In Niger, we identified cropland encroachment in 44 out of 52 pastoral reserves.
- In the same study, we found that 18% of the surface area studied within pastoral reserves had been converted to cropland between 2016 and 2023.
- An academic paper was published, outlining the development and implementation of the methodology in Burkina Faso (Link Here)