Land Saturation in SE Niger: Triangulating Qualitative and Quantitative Information for Critical Assessment of Land Use Trajectories

Anette Reenberg,Issoufou Maman,Bjarne Fog,Ibrahim Bouzou Moussa

doi:10.3390/land2030508

Abstract

The paper analyzes land use changes, notably cropland expansion, in SE-Niger from the mid-1980s to 2011. It scrutinizes land use trajectories and investigates how cultivation shifts between dune landscapes and valleys (bas-fonds) in response to climate, population pressure, and sociocultural opportunities, combining lenses rooted in land change science and the notions of double exposure and human-environmental timelines. Specifically, the interest is directed towards exploring the value of different methods of land use data harvesting. The importance of cropland expansion is assessed in two ways: by interpreting Landsat satellite images and by interviewing local people to obtain qualitative descriptions. The results demonstrate a glaring discrepancy between the assessed land use trends derived from these two data sources. Issues such as important developments in landscape priorities, allocation of cropland between dunes and valleys, possible land saturation, and adaptation to climate change or globalization are portrayed very differently. It is concluded that critical attention to data reliability is crucial to avoid misleading narratives in land change science, especially in places covered by sparse data.

Highlights

The severe drought years of the 1970s and 1980s drew a great deal of attention to the Sahelian region from the public media and the donor community
Some attempts have been made to employ available statistics to draw an approximate map of land use [11] or to make a dynamic model of land use changes in the
The four case studies of villages (Kojimiri, Beriram, Dinkari, and Karagou) provide, together with the satellite-based mapping of cropland change in the region around Goudoumaria, an empirical platform to investigate the significance of field encroachment in SE-Niger and to explore plausible causal factors of cropland changes

Summary

Introduction

The severe drought years of the 1970s and 1980s drew a great deal of attention to the Sahelian region from the public media and the donor community. A number of ‘narratives’ have developed into established truths beyond need of further documentation [6]. These include, for example, vicious circles of land degradation, prompted by population pressure and low rainfall, leading to excessive expansion of fields onto marginal land, which, in turn, leads to irreversible degradation of the natural resource base, lower productivity, and the need for larger areas to sustain the population [7]. A robust, region wide characterization of the land use systems in the Sahel and of the dynamic changes has been difficult to establish, not least because of the lack of reliable, site-specific information on land use and key driving forces of land use change. Income generation from change (sesame) in horticulture good year (2010) and migration No more land.

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