More than one quarter of Africa’s tree cover is found outside areas previously classified as forest
(2023) Nature Communications — Vol. 14, n° 1, p. 2258 (2023)
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- The consistent monitoring of trees both inside and outside of forests is key to sustainable landmanagement. Currentmonitoring systems either ignore trees outside forests or are too expensive to be applied consistently across countries on a repeated basis. Here we use the PlanetScope nanosatellite constellation, which delivers global very high-resolution daily imagery, to map both forest and non-forest tree cover for continental Africa using images from a single year. Our prototype map of 2019 (RMSE = 9.57%, bias = −6.9%). demonstrates that a precise assessment of all tree-based ecosystems is possible at continental scale, and reveals that 29% of tree cover is found outside areas previously classified as tree cover in state-of-the-art maps, such as in croplands and grassland. Such accurate mapping of tree cover down to the level of individual trees and consistent among countries has the potential to redefine land use impacts in non-forest landscapes,move beyond the need for forest definitions, and build the basis for natural climate solutions and treerelated studies.
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Florian Reiner, Martin Brandt, Xiaoye Tong, David Skole, Ankit Kariryaa, Philippe Ciais, Andrew Davies, Pierre Hiernaux, Jérôme Chave, Maurice Mugabowindekwe, Christian Igel, Stefan Oehmcke, Fabian Gieseke, Sizhuo Li, Siyu Liu, Sassan Saatchi, Peter Boucher, Jenia Singh, Simon Taugourdeau, et al. (2023). More than one quarter of Africa’s tree cover is found outside areas previously classified as forest. Nature Communications, 14(1), 2258. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37880-4 (Original work published 2023)