Home / Knowledge Portal / Food security policy and governance / Land governance / Monitoring agricultural expansion in Burkina Faso over 14 years: The role of population growth and implications for the environment
February 16th, 2017

Monitoring agricultural expansion in Burkina Faso over 14 years: The role of population growth and implications for the environment

Published by Remote Sensing,

This article (PDF) in the journal Remote Sensing uses remote sensing with a high spatial resolution (30 m) to monitor agricultural expansion in Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso ranges amongst the fastest growing countries in the world with an annual population growth rate of more than three percent. This trend has consequences for food security since agricultural productivity is still on a comparatively low level in Burkina Faso. In order to compensate for the low productivity, the agricultural areas are expanding quickly. The mapping and monitoring of this expansion is difficult, even on the basis of remote sensing imagery, since the extensive farming practices and frequent cloud coverage in the area make the delineation of cultivated land from other land cover and land use types a challenging task. Thus, improved methods for mapping LULCC (land use and land cover change) are needed. For this study, the authors used a newly developed framework to generate high temporal (8-day) and high spatial (30 m) resolution time series for all of Burkina Faso for the years 2001, 2007, and 2014. For training and validation, a randomly sampled reference dataset was generated from Google Earth images and expert knowledge. The results show an expansion of agricultural area of 91% between 2001 and 2014 to a total of 116,900 km². While rainfed agricultural areas account for the major part of this trend, irrigated areas and plantations also increased considerably, primarily promoted by specific development projects. This expansion goes in line with the rapid population growth in most provinces of Burkina Faso where land was still available for an expansion of agricultural area. The analysis of agricultural encroachment into protected areas and their surroundings highlights the increased human pressure on these areas and the challenges of environmental protection for the future

Curated from mdpi.com