Monitoring of critical water and vegetation anomalies of sub-Saharan West-African Wetlands

Surface water is a critical resource in semi-arid west-African regions that are frequently exposed to droughts. The application of time series from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) to derive spatio-temporal changes of water and vegetation in and around West-African wetlands is demonstrated for the years 2000-2012. A near infrared (NIR) based gradient threshold and calculation of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is applied on the time series using the MOD09Q1 surface reflectance product. Surface water dynamics and vegetation anomalies of surrounding regions were found to coincide with the occurrence of drought seasons. This study demonstrates the successful application of remote sensing time series for wetland monitoring.