1st December 1996 - 30 November 2000
EU's Cooperation With Developing Countries (INCO-DC) Programme
Various combinations of widely spaced trees and grasslands are widespread in dry tropical areas. Known as open woodlands, in contrast to the dense forests of the humid tropics with their closed canopies, they account for over a third of all tropical forests but have been heavily neglected by researchers. So estimates of their rates of deforestation and degradation are inaccurate and knowledge of the underlying causes of human impacts is poor.
The project is funded by a 901,000 ECU grant from the European Union's Cooperation With Developing Countries (INCO-DC) Programme.
The aim is to shed more light on what is happening to open woodlands in Africa, where they account for two thirds of all forest cover.
The project will run for four years and field studies are being carried out in Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.
The project is devising new techniques to monitor woodland degradation using satellite imagery, undertaking empirical studies of the underlying social and economic causes of degradation, and using the results of these studies to devise an economic model which, when linked with a GIS database, will be used to simulate trends in woodland degradation in space and time. It is also looking at the influence of government policies and local and national institutions on the use of open woodlands.
Collaborating in the project are teams from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium; the Agricultural University of Norway; the Centre Suivi Ecologique, and the University of Dakar, both in Senegal; Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania; and Makerere University, Uganda. Alan Grainger is coordinating the entire project and playing a leading role in developing and testing GIS models for simulating trends in degradation.