Analysis of the vegetation trends using low resolution remote sensing data in Burkina Faso (1982–1999) for the monitoring of desertification

After about two decades of dramatic rainfall deficits that started in the late 1960s, the Sahel of West Africa has experienced increasing precipitation since the early 1990s. The implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) needs the identification of areas that record declining vegetation productivity over long‐time periods. In this scope, we analyse the state of the vegetation productivity using long‐term time series of NOAA AVHRR NDVI data and compare it to rainfall data. For this, 128 rain gauge data (RR) were compared with the integrated NDVI during the growing period (iNDVI) values in Burkina Faso from 1982 to 1999. During the analysed period, most of the studied stations in the country were stable for the iNDVI/RR (57.8%). However, 39.8% showed a weak to strong negative trend in the iNDVI/RR while only 2.4% showed a weak positive trend. These negative trends may reflect ongoing desertification processes in Burkina Faso and could be a starting point for the identification of hot‐spots areas to determine where to take action to combat desertification.