Title: Vegetation change appraisal at conservation sites using MODIS NDVI in response to climate change in Burkina Faso

Abstract

Vegetation play a significant role in mitigating the negative impacts of climate change. In this study the objective was the vegetation change appraisal at the soil and water conservation sites in the Burkina Faso. The MODIS NDVI data, meteorological data (rainfall and temperature), the meteorological data was used for the rainfall variability analysis using the standardized precipitation index (SPI). The regression model was applied to find the relationship between rainfall and vegetation (NDVI).Further, the RESTREND method was applied to understand the trend of NDVI over the studied period from 2002 to 2016. The result outlined that correlation analysis between NDVI and rainfall show a high value for all selected soil water conservation sites than the NDVI and temperature, by indicating that vegetation is more sensitive to rainfall change in the selected sites. Further, we state that vegetation growth benefited from the implementation of the soil water conservation management (SWCM) impacting more on the vegetation cover than the climate variables (rainfall and temperature). This study depicts that logical management of SWCM will improve the vegetation stocks.