BIOTA West

BIOTA-West is an interdisciplinary cross-national subproject of the project network BIOTA AFRICA. Therein, German and Western african partners are engaged in closed collaboration in biodiversity research in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Benin. Goal is to identificate processes leading to a species decrease and to develop methods for their conservation. Building up a continental monitoring network of african biodiversity and land degradation shall deliver decision makers scientific established and socio economic basics for an efficient and sustained environmental management.

For further informations see http://www.biota-africa.org

The Remote Sensing Unit deals with local and regional modell generation of land cover distribution for further analyses in the BIOTA project. Beside land cover and land use mapping over a wide area actual researches are targeted on a new spectral unmixing approach for a more precise land cover detection. With it both a more sensitive temporal change detection and a more accurate estimation of species distribution dependence on specific land cover types is possible. Further research topics are modelling regional biomes distribution for conclusions about species occurence, and analysing fire patterns in Western Africa.

Contact: Martin Wegmann