Biomass burning and broad-scale land-cover changes in Western Africa

The effect of fires on land cover was investigated with coarse spatial resolution remote sensing data on West Africa. We tested whether fires lead to land-cover changes or maintain land cover in a state of equilibrium. This was measured independently for early- and late-season fires, for different ecological zones, and for areas characterized by different levels of land-use intensity. Spatial associations between broad-scale land-cover-change maps and fire-distribution maps were calculated. The statistical results reveal that, for a few subregions, there is a statistically significant relation between fire occurrence and land-cover changes as measured by coarse-resolution remote sensing data, whereas, at a broad scale, there is no such relation. The main conclusion is that the scale of the data analyzed in this study is inappropriate for reaching any definitive conclusion on the effect of fires on land cover. This is due, first, to an inadequate spatial resolution to detect all fires and their associated ecological effects and second, to the heterogeneity of the population, given the size of the study area. (C) Elsevier Science Inc., 1997.