oil
block 5A
- MASSIVE DISPLACEMENT IN TRADITIOnal land use
- The
oil
fields of Sudan / Southern Sudan -
Summary
of Prins peer reviewed research results - covering latest advances and monitoring system
Background and Introduction
In 2006 Prins was commissioned by ECOS to investigate land use changes in Sudans Oil
Block 5a with particular focus on the 1999-2003 period. Previously,
Prins had investigated
Oil Block 3 and 7
for ECOS with the same objective:
to map the oil facilities and the traditional land use
pattern covering 1999-2003. A cornerstone in these analysis have been
Landsat data.
Quality Landsat data has been available since the mid 80'ties and has ever since
continuously monitored the earth with multi spectral image data. This means that
the recorded areas are monitored into seven different light wavelengths (e.g.,
visible and Infared light areas) that in combinations or in models can tell us
detailed information on what we are looking at. For example, crop types, water
content, biomass or rangeland conditions etc. For the engaged layman - see also
NASA description of
Landsat data).
For Sudan/South Sudan Prins has more than 25 yrs experience with using
Landsat data (see
more). For example,
Prins has looked into a large part of the oil fields of Sudan / Southern
Sudan.
Prins has
further uncovered the existence of the Darfur crisis that showed
the Landsat potential for uncovering crime against humanity.
The 5a case has come a long way since it started in 2006. After the case reached
international attention in 2010, I became interested in the robustness of the
Landsat application for monitoring the footprint of the traditional farming
system. At the same time Very High Resolution (VHR) or self-explaining satellite images were
increasingly becoming available on Google Earth, which offered an alternative
mean to verify Landsat analysis. Some of
these results were presented at an invited talk to the Swedish Space days in
Stockholm 2013 (presentation available
down listed). In 2013-2015 the
5a area/Unity Sate was
exposed to new humanitarian suffering. This resulted in a high amount of VHR
images became available on Google Earth. This allowed a more systematic and
comprehensive evaluation of the Landsat application, which was published
in the
International
Journal of Remote Sensing in 2017.
See more of the recent advances in
Summary
of Prins peer reviewed research results - including method development
establishment of a monitoring system.
In the following I will show how this work has unfolded. It will start off with a
description of the traditional agro-pastoral land use which is key to understand
the patterns that be derived from the satellite data.
For normal laymen's I will recommend to read the down listed
description of the traditional agro-pastoral land use,
summery of the Landsat analysis and perhaps stick to the figures and explaining
text. The text as such is meant for the engaged or knowledgeable layman or even
earth observation specialist. There is also a link to
the results that are front-end applied research of human
abuse - Earth Observation application -
pictures and capture text in this pro version can perhaps also be informative
for an engaged layman.
Summery of the initial and holding findings of using Landsat data for mapping
land use changes in oil block 5a:
The Landsat
data could map the traditional way of life of people livening in the area by
primarily showing the foot print from cattle's - this means that grazing
activity exposes the soil which reflectance is captured by Landsat. The pattern
and link to presence of people could be best monitored in a time slot after crop
harvest where farming activities were concentrated at and in the
surroundings of the traditional homesteads. Hence, comparing images from one
year to another showed the change pattern. Explaining or verifying the change
pattern was linked to comprehensive ground reporting on displacements of people
at the same time.
Figure 1. The 5a area is located in South
Sudan with the White Nile passing by. The area is flat, sesonal wet and
flooding can occure. The background image is Landsat
data recored the 27. November 1999 and set into show natural colours. Lush vegetation is green
and the human footprint is withish from farming activity that are exposing soils (the
observed farming activity is mainly the result of high cattle
concentrations - see more below). The map has been applied major towns,
water courses in blue and show eastern border of oil
block 5a. The images was taken just before the establishment of the
all-weather road from Leer over Thar Jath (oil field) to Bentiu. Grids from oil
field exploration was also visible and digitized in yellow.
Files, reports, links and pdf are found
in the button of this page
The
traditional land use
With the vicinity of the White Nile and surrounding swampy areas (the
Sudd) the area are characterized by seasonal wetness and flooding. The
landscape is flat and
covered by grass
and wooded grasslands that are utilized by
Nuer and
Dinka pastoralists.
A large part of south Sudan are covered by flood plains and marshes that are suited for
the
agro-pastoral lifestyle, which have resulted in there is more cattle than
humans. Both the Nuer and Dinkas lifeform is focused on the cattles.
Their permanent settlements are typically placed on higher grounds that is
typically old natural river levees, which is just elevated enough to avoid normal seasonal
flooding or wetness. During the wet period (May-November) both people and cattles are concentrated
on these slightly elevated homesteads where crops are grown and
harvesting is typically over by the start of the dry season in November. During
the dry season the cattles are driven to the large wet or river areas to find fresh
grasses. This is a kind of
transhumance agro-pastoral farming system that is
widespread across the Sudano-Sahel region of Africa.
Figure 2. High concentrations of Nuer cattles (abigar) which
is adapted to study area. Nuer is also called 'the abigar people'. People are living in Tukuls (huts) that can be seen in
the background.
Figure 3. Cattles grazing activity leaves a footprint via
vegetation degradation and soil exposure that can effectively be observed in
multi-spectral satellite images (photo credit: @ Peter Lawson).
Figure 4. During dry season cattles are driven far to major wetland
areas close to the main rivers where fresh grasses are found
(photo credit: @
Nakachew Minuye and Nuer study).
In the study area the traditional settlements are predominantly located on sandy
levees along streams (fig 5). People are living in Tukuls - circular single room mud
huts with thatched roofs. Cattles can also be kept in huts that usually are
larger that those populated by humans. The settlements are typically spread
along a string along streams. Cropping takes place just around the housing (see
below).
Figure 5. Typical settlement area viewed from an air plane. The
settlement huts are typically located along slightly elevated natural levees of streams (Upper right - green overgrow in dry season). The recent
cultivated farm field areas are the most bright grayish - dry grass or fallow
areas are yellowish.
Photo credit/Copyright © : Sharon Hutchinson.
The effect of pastorals or pastoral farming is that grazing activity produces
a seasonal resource degradation of the vegetation. However, during the rainy season the
vegetation normally recovers unless an area has been severely overgrazed for
years or otherwise
degraded (e.g. permanent housing) so the vegetation will take more seasons to recover.
This type of ecosystem degradation,
are typically occurring around water points, for example
areas surrounding boreholes in Sahel or in this case the center of
a permanent
settlement that can have under hard land use
for several years that grasses can take more than a season to reestablish.
However, this ecosystem degradation phenomenon was only observed at limited
extent in this study (see e.g. fig of Boaw).
Monitoring
of the Agro-pastoralnen Land Use from Satellites
Landsat satellite data was chosen as the key data source to detect the human
footprint in the area. More specifically, it was found that the footprint from
the farming activity could be observed at and around their traditional
homesteads after harvest. At this time in the early dry season a bright
signature was left from cropping activity and a high concentration of cattles
have been around for months.
This means, that if no farming signature (bright signature) or substantial
reduced farming activity could be observed from the traditional permanent
settlement areas the following year - then people and their cattle's have not
been around.
The environmental dynamic was great in the area, with a cloudy wet season that
produced a strong flush in vegetation that hides the human activity. Hence, just
before the dry season (November) was found to be the most suited time-slot to
trace the farming activity.
At this time bush fires (see more below) where not predominant. During the focus
time 1999-2003 the area were monitored by Landsat 5 and 7 that each had a
revisit cycle of 16 days. However, with the exclusion of images with
unacceptable amount of noise, reduced the number of suitable annual images to
very few - at best. In other words for the November time-slot 1998-2002 only one
or two annual images was found useful to be compared across years.
Figure 6, show how the area (approx. 125 x 128 km) looks like in natural colors observed from Landsat images
(band 3,2,1) recorded 1994 to 2004. lt can be observed that most
images are collected at about November. At this time the lush vegetation stands
out in green and the human footprint in bright whitish colors (high reflectance
from bare soils -higher
resolution image here). A close-up (h) show the classic
farming pattern located along elevated sandy river levees where cropping takes
place (see also fig 5). The surrounding areas are more moist and have dark soils
(vertisols).
Figure 6. A selection of Landsat images in natural colors
(band 3,2,1)
covering the study area (125 x 128 km) from 1994 to 2004. The close-up (h) show
the typical land use pattern of homestead settlement areas located on slightly
elevated sand banks - see also fig. 5 for an arieal view at a finer scale
(higher
resolution image here).
The large scale picture show that from about 2000 the concentration of
farming activity ichanges and moves South West and South.
Moving into the dry season, transhumance
activity with cattle herding to wet areas and bush fires can blurr the appearance
of people. Hence, at this time, the dynamics in the environment and
opportunistic cattle herding over relatively large distances for fresh grasses
(can move 30-100 km per day /
source:
Nakachew Minuye) can make consistent assessment
of disturbance in the farming system challenging at a fine scale (see fig 7). However, intense activity from people
and cattles can overruled e.g. the bush fire noise and show the immediate
concentration of people or cattles during the
dry period
(see fig 8).
Figure 7.
Landsat image covering the Kuac settlement area (see location in fig 1 or below). The image is taken
just into the dry season where bush fires scares (dark brownish areas) are present. The
land use footprint from light grazing can becoming masked at this time of year.
However, immediately
high concentration of particular cattles tend to overrule the fire scare
effect and again leave a bright foot print. In the
image a more or less dried out stream is meandering northward of Kuac, tracks
can be seen that can be linked to cattle herding that have crossed a bush fire
scare and left a footprint. Hence, at this time of year, the very bright
areas can be linked to concentration of people and cattles.
Hence, in spite of the area tend to swept into bush fires scares during the dry season,
the large scale concentrations of people and their cattle's could still leave a
clear foot print of their immediate appearance at the scale of the study area
which revealed a massive from 2000 to 2002 (fig 8).
Figure 8. Four Landsat images recorded over the area into the
dry season where bush fire scares are a fequent feature
(higher
resolution image here).
The time serie show a bright footprint that have a relative consistent spatial
patteren in 1995 (a) and 2000 (b). In march 2002 (c) this pattern changes and
the central area is significant reduced and areas in north east and south east
are growing. In the end of December 2002 (d) the concentration of the human
footprint has moved south.
Within range-land management it has for a long time been well known that
satellite data offers a more effective mean than aerial photos to monitor
the larger scale degradation patterns from grazing (e.g. Tueller 1989). Particular,
the multi-spectral band recording from satellites are sensitive to bare soil,
thus offers opportunities to
analyze the effect of grazing that goes beyond what can be interpreted from only
the visible light area commonly offered by Very High Resolutions (VHR) earth
observation data or aerial photos.
Figure 9.
On the left, Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite data
in natural colors taken in the dry season with a spatial resolution of
0.5 m - farm
fields and huts are clearly visible. On the right a false-color composite of Landsat data using two infra-red
and red light channels that produces an easily interpretable image with
vegetation in green, fresh farm fields are whitish and wet areas dark bluish.
The red quadrant is the cover of the VHR image on the left. In the Landsat data
(band 7,5,3) bare harvested farm fields show whitish, which also characterize
heavy land degradation from cattles.
The application of
digital processing of the multi spectral satellite images and particular Landsat data has been
available for about 50 years. This includes well established methods, for
example deriving biophysical indices that
are found very closely correlated with e.g., plant productivity,
brightness, wetness etc. An example of composition of such indices can be viewed
below (fig 10), which is a Tassel Cap transformation of the area that can be
viewed in fig 9. This can help to interpret the
biophysical character of objects of interest and can be an additional source to
support image interpretation or as input digital image classification.
Figure 10. A Tassel Cap
transformation of the Landsat data covering the area shown above (fig 9). Remark the transect set across the
bare farm field (see also fig 9). Tassel Caps produces image layers that show biophysical
processes or response that are shown on the right. Here they indicate
properties of the farm field compared to its surroundings; high brightness, bare and
dry.
Categorical classification of satellite images is also well known for decades
and has traditionally been performed by supervised or unsupervised classifications. The
supervised classification utilizes training areas from well known sites as input
to a classification algorithm that eventually categorize the image into the
trained classes. The unsupervised classification can be considered as an early
machine learning algorithm that, for example, automatically classifies the image based upon
spectral clusters of the selected bands and a user defined
number of classes. As such, the supervised classification are considered as a
stronger approach - however, to obtain high accuracy requires that the training
data is representative for the objects your want to class, which in some cases
can be difficult to threshold. Hence, there are some examples where unsupervised classifications have shown
particular useful that includes the effect
of grazing (Tueller 1989; Lemenkova
2021). This can be linked to the multi-spectra
properties of
e.g. Landsat bands are sensitive to soil reflectance. Hence, Landsat can respond
to even light grazing activity which can be difficult to interpret from very
high resolution platforms or categorize on the ground (Booth and Tueller 2003). The tracks in figure
7
illustrates this, although the Landsat data has 30 m spatial resolution the
change in soil reflectance from tracks that are not more than few meters wide
can
predominate the image element. This is one of the cases where the lower spatial
resolution Landsat data appear stronger or more effective than visual interpretation of VHR imagery
to trace the effect of grazing at larger scales.
Hence, Landsat data has several qualities that
make it suitable information source to document land use changes over time; despite the 30 m spatial resolution, it has
the multi-spectral information and the data covers large areas so that analysis can be made from e.g. one image with consistent properties.
Furthermore, archives of good quality data are freely available from the mid
80'ties.
For the Prins 2009 report the aim was to
verify the large scale change pattern in traditional land use by linking ground
reporting of attacks or displacement of people from settlement areas. In other
words, to provide evidence of change in land use patterns - if there is a significant consistency
between ground reporting of displacement of people and change in traditional
land use patterns during the 1999-2003 time-slot.
Landsat L1T calibrated data was predominantly used in the Prins 2009 report. The procedure was
quite simple and easy to reproduce; late growing season images were preferred to monitor
change pattern in the traditional
land use. The logic in this was; At this time the farming activity should be concentrated at the homestead areas
and image noise are limited, thus if no activity then no people. The same geo-subset
was cut out of all images and these were individually classified into 60 classes
by the unsupervised ISODATA classifier in ERDAS Imagine pro software - using
defaults settings. The unsupervised classifier was chosen as it worked quite
well in response to the visual interpretation of the images and there were
limited means to verify training areas for a supervised classification when most
of work was done (2006-7). The results of the iso-classifications were visually
interpreted and in nearly all cases the two brightest classes were merged into one representing the
traditional land use from each recording and excluding areas in oil block 4,
north of Bahr el-Ghazal river. The land use area was derived from each image and Boolean change maps were composed as visual products for
showing the history and spatial pattern of change. In addition, some dry season images were used and
processed in a similar manner. These were used to collaborate the extent of the
traditional land use before the development of the oil industry (see e.g. fig. 6
and 11) or support ground reporting's of the massive displacement of people following the reported major
clash in the Nhialdiu area. Few images contained cloud contamination, which was
removed and considered to have marginal effect on the overall mapped land use
and area pattern. For exploring the historical land use activity and explaining
change patterns the least cloud contaminated Landsat images from early dry
season were collected in the 1987-2006 period.
Mapping of the consistency in farming activity covering the area in early dry
season was preformed (e.g. 1994-95 - see fig 11 and interpret fig 6 and 8) as a
reference of the traditional land use pattern before reporting of fighting and
development of oil industry.
Figure 11. Example of the result of an unsupervised ISO classification
that sort the image into classes after spectral properties of the bands. In this
case a 60 class classification was specifyed and land use came out in one or two
classes and used to show the extent of the seasonal tradition land use. In this
case, it shows two senarious of late 1994 - early 1995 - one month apart that show the
consistent high concentration of farming activity or homesteads before the onset of oil industry
development. The farming pattern is consistent with the extent of settlement patterns
that can observed in
Russian maps from the 80'ties.
Figure 12. An assemblage of the unsupervised ISODATA classifications showing footprints of
the location of people observed during late 1999 to early 2003. With reference
to the ground reporting's the footprint are interpreted as follows; A) show the
concentration of traditional land use concentration in the Nhialdue area (see
location in fig 1). B)
Some month later than A, into the dry season, showing a strong footprint and
collaborate reporting's of more people were coming into the Nhialdue area
following attacks on villages e.g. the northern end of the oil road. C) Just
after the reported major attack on the Nhialdue the footprint are pushed south west that
collaborate that people flee in the first place against Wicok and Chotchar (see
also fig 1,6 and 8). D) Show that the farming footprint is now strongest in
south-south-west that is consistent with the reporting's that the majority of
people ended up here. E) into the dry season a couple of month later, bushfires
have swept over the Nhialdue area and the major footprint is now in
south-south-west were it were reported people were ended up. F) The same pattern
as E - one month later.
As indicated from the Landsat time series above
(Fig. 6, 8 and 12) there were indication of massive displacement in the
traditional land use areas, particular during 1999-2003. These changes could be linked to
the reported massive human abuses that were avaliable from plenty of independent sources
(most summed up in HRW 2003). For example, some of these included
comprehensive quistionnaire of local people carried out by surveyors from
Christian Aid and ECOS that transformed their findings into simple maps (Fig.
13).
Figure 13. Simple maps of displacement of people based upon
questionnaire of local people following the major clash and reported
clearing of the Nhialdue area in 2002. The maps also included escape routes the places where they ended up.
In summery, it showed a displacement from Nhialdiu area and most people were
first driven south west and then south.
Overall, at the large scale, three major
displacement areas could be summarised from the ground reportings.
These areas
was digitized and used to collaborate the change pattern observed in traditional
land use from the Landsat data.
Figure 14. Focus areas for change detection in
traditional land use. The three selected focus areas are within oil block
5a and digitized after careful interpretation of the displacment extent from several
ground reports. For example, the northern end of the oil road used a buffer of
2.5 km as it was reported that villages within half an hours walk from oil road
were attacked (HRW 2003).
When the mapping of the Landsat analysis where put together into a change map in
traditional land use, it was found to fully collaborate the ground reportings of
attacks and displacement of people. This did not only include the focus areas
but the hole area as such (Fig 15). For example, the south ends of the oil road
(e.g. around Bieh - attacked in 2002; HRW 2003;
Sudanreevs
;
Relifeweb 2002)
and the larger area surrounding Nhialdue. In the Prins 2009 report the
statistics from focus areas during 1999-2003 showed the most conservative
measures of land use a reduction of 72%, while including the dry season images
99% reduction. From the road side these numbers were ranging from 61-97%. In the
Stockholm presentation (fig 14 and 15) the focus areas were elaborated in more
detailed and showed for the Nov. 1999 - Nov. 2002 a 90% reduction in Nhialdue
and 85% for the northern road side. These figures can be hold against reportings
that claims these areas to have been deserted - that the result is consistent
with - and
anomalies in statistics can be related to exact timing of event e.g. the road
site were attacked earlier and some stayed around untill 2001 and that some core
settlement areas do not recover immediately with vegetation if they have been
bare for years. However, in conclusion - the result show that a massive
displacement of land use could be observed and is consistent with the conclusions of the comprehensive ground
reportings. In other words; no other plausible explanation
could be reached from interpreating the Landsat archives and the Landsat data
analysis.
Figure 15. Focus areas and events put together with Landsat analysis of land use
during the 1999-2004. The two data sources supported each other by the change in
the land use footprint. Statistics of traditional land use area collaborated
that the two areas were reported to be deserted by the end of 2002. The reported
major refugee area in south could also be confirmed by the steep increase in
land use. Yellow explosions refer to identified settlement areas that have been
reported attacked and green triangles refer to refugee campsites. It can further
be seen that at the south end of the oil road - the area around settlement Bieh
show depopulation, which also have been reported (ECOS 2002; HRW 2003;
Sudanreevs;
Relifeweb 2002)
to be attacked several times during early 2002.
The Landsat data also uncovered the gradual development of the oil
infrastructure. Figure 16 show the status of the development in 2006 and
features that were observed in the Landsat data untill 2006. Remark the
elevated all weather roads traps water or disturb the natural hydrology. The
backdrop image is Landsat band 7 that is sensitive to wetness. More detailed
image that show hydrological disturbance close to Thar Jath be viewed in the
here and in the Prins 2009 report.
Figure 16. Development of the oil infrastructure observed and digitized from the Landsat data -
status October 2006.
A generalized
scenario showing development of oil industry, reported attacks or reported
fights (most comprehensive source: HRW 2003) as well as refugee camp areas and
the major change pattern in land use (2000-2002) can be view in figure 17.
Figure 17.
A scenario which support the link between mass dislocation of people and
development of oil infrastructure. The map
summarises
change in traditional land use 2000-2002 that has applied, geo-located village
attacks or fighting's from reports as well as observed developed oil infrastructure in 2006.
Brown refers to areas which were observed as farming areas in 2000 but not in
late 2002. Bright
green show observed farming activity in
late
2002.
Post 2010
work
As
new reference sources became available post 2010 more investigations were put
into the satellite methodology for exploring potentials and consistency in the
land use assessments or classification.
Post 2010, VHR images were becoming freely
available via Google Earth that could be used to access the accuracy of the
classification approach at much finer scales as well as using supervised
classifications that small training areas for classification and verification
(see fig 18). This was in first place the seasonal
farming activity at the homesteads that were evaluated. Figure 19; show the
placement of the first freely available VHR images within the study area (fig 9
and 10 contain part of the 2006 image).
Figure 18.
Typical
farming area observed from Very High Resolution satellite taken well into the
dry season. Circular huts are visible as well as bare and heavily degraded areas
(digitized and used for traning and verification in Landsat analysis - see below). The very bright areas indicate that there is recent activity on the ground. The ripping
pattern in lower part of images is previously cultivated areas. The dark grayish
areas indicate that bush fires have swept the area since the rainy season.
Figure 19. From approximately 2010 an increase in detailed
spatial data became available, including VHR images on Google Earth and
databases of named settlements (yellow dots in figure). Recent land use
activities were digitised from 2003 and 2006 VHR images and used to make
accuracy assessment of the landsat classification at scales of 0.5 - 2 ha (see
table 1 below). The two inserted images show co-occrence (white) and comission error (green) and
omission error (red). The 2006 classification covers the areas shown in figure 9 and 10.
There is plenty of algorithms that can be used
for Landsat
image classifications - however, the important point is how you relate your result to a
hypothesis or an assumption that should have source that can be verified
against. Therefore, it is good practice to make accuracy assessment against an
independent reference. At higher spatial resolution, this is commonly done by an
error matrix which includes overall mapping accuracy (%) and class errors -
omission (did not catch) and commission error (classed too much).
Kappa statistics have also been used as one
measure to describe overall accuracy levels (e.g. Fagan and De Fries 2009)
although this approach is still debated.
An accuracy assessment of the 2006 and
2003 showed that the unsupervised image classification method used in Prins 2009 preformed well
at higher resolution (table 1). However,
a machine learning algorithm (Classification Tree Analysis (CTA)) that is known
to be particular effective to handle PCA transformed data (Tassel Cap) was found
to perform very strong when it was evaluated with VHR images (table 1). The CTA
also showed strong in a comprehensive comparison of classifications methods that was scientifically published (Prins
2018). This (Prins 2018) showed that the errors linked to the unsupervised ISODATA algorithm
was commission errors. In other words, this means that the unsupervised
classifier consistently grabbed more land use than the 10% threshold set out for
the verification. However, it simply enlarged the active homesteads areas (see
examples here) beyond what could
consistently be interpreted from the VHR images source. This means that it is
not necessary wrong - it is just hard to verify the light grazing.
Very high accuracy is generally more difficult
to achieve at fine scale. However, as a hand rule, you can increase the scale or
minimum mapping units and reduce the errors (see table 1).
Table 1. Accuracy
assessment of classification methods that was tested on Landsat images and using
Q-bird 2 VHR images on Google Earth as a mean of verification. ISODATA is
unsupervised classification and CTA is a supervised tree classifier that have
been used to threshold spectral bands or biophysical indices. Overall mapping
accuracy is very high. In 2012 Kappa statistics was used to document mapping
agreement - that accuracy levels have been taken from Fagan and De Fries (2009)
who used it to describe overall accuracy for classification types. All
classification methods showed acceptable accuracy levels and the CTA classifier
allowed detailed mapping with very high accuracy at settlement level - according
to the Minimum Mapping Unit (MMU) used.
More advanced methods were elaborated, this included narrow inter-calibration
of images that show changes in more detail by the use of continuous data instead
of the categorical classification. Below (fig 20) show an example of only using
change in blue light (Band 1). The narrow inter calibration of images from
different years means that you can establish a monitoring system that make
values comparable or consistent from year to year, which is another way of
providing evidence of change over years. Many approaches were later tested as much more
reference data became available for training and verification. Eventually, this
was developed as a monitoring system that has strong implication for rangelands
and sustainable resource utilization. Details can be viewed in the Prins (2018)
and the summery.
Figure 20. Change in blue light reflectance for November 1999 and 2002 image. Landsat band 1 (Blue light; 450 nm) holds limited information but is good in
separation of bare soil and vegetation. Band 1 could be narrowly calibrated
in-between Landsat recordings across years (see more in
scientific summery).
Conclusion
Overall the results of the satellite mapping (Prins 2009;
Stockholm 2013
presentation) fully collaborate and detail the
ground reports of mass displacement of people in oil block 5a during 1999-2003 .
It
was found that most consistent footprint of
the traditional agro-pastoral land could be monitored after harvest
(November). At this time people and cattles have been concentrated at the homestead and
the land use leaves a brightness
footprint from exposed soils. Into the dry season immediate high concentration
of people and cattle's could also be observed although cattle herding and bush
fires introduces challenges to map the extent of less intense land use. The study
used the best available seasonal Landsat data (e.g. limited cloud
contamination). It was found that the anomaly in land use that was shown for
1999-2002 was supported by testing a variation of digital classification methods
and establishment of a monitoring system (Prins
2018 summery). This means that the result is consistent, and it
is not likely that the observed massive changes in land use patterns had not
occurred.
For
mapping of the traditional agro-pastoral land use displacement of people over time the categorical ISODATA
classification worked effectively to show large scale patterns. Monitoring
systems of the tested classification solutions may have implications for
calculation of population numbers and as such may be used in other context of
humanitarian crisis and range land and sustainable land use management.
Supplements:
PRINS KEY-NOTE SPEAKER AT THE SWEDISH SPACE DAYS 2013:
Global reporting interpretation of speach
pdf PRESENTAION OF THE 5A CASE AND ANALYSIS - INVITED TALK REMOTE SENSING DAYS
STOCKHOLM 8 APRIL 2013
pdf REPORT TO ECOS 2009:
Satellite mapping of land cover and use in relation to Oil exploitation in
concession 5A
Client of the 2009 report: The European Coalition on Oil in Sudan (ECOS)
References:
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Bastin, G.
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Booth, D.T.,
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