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Personal photograph

Lars Eklundh

Professor

Personal photograph

Precipitation controls Sahel greening trend

Author

  • Thomas Hickler
  • Lars Eklundh
  • Jonathan Seaquist
  • Benjamin Smith
  • Jonas Ardö
  • Lennart Olsson
  • Martin Sykes
  • Martin Sjöström

Summary, in English

The Sahel region has been identified as a "hot spot'' of global environmental change, but understanding of the roles of different climatic and anthropogenic forcing factors driving change in the region is incomplete. We show that a process-based ecosystem model driven by climatic and atmospheric CO2 data alone closely reproduces the satellite-observed greening trend of the Sahel vegetation and its interannual variability between 1982 and 1998. Changes in precipitation were identified as the primary driver of the aggregated simulated vegetation changes. According to the model, the increasing carbon uptake through vegetation was associated with an increasing relative carbon sink; but integrated over the whole period, the Sahel was predicted to be a net source of carbon.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)

Publishing year

2005

Language

English

Publication/Series

Geophysical Research Letters

Volume

32

Issue

21

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

American Geophysical Union (AGU)

Topic

  • Physical Geography

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1944-8007