Carbon emissions caused by woodland fires in the African tropical savannas

Abstract

Uncontrolled fires resulted from irrational land management caused 17-24% of woodlands burnt, 3.4-20.5 million tons of biomass loss, and emitted 1.4-8.1 million tons of C into atmosphere every winter (or dry season). The huge amount of carbon, that could have been avoided, due to the irrational land management and practice, was emitted. 2. Differencing and conditional thresholding at ICL unit (ICLU) level (the approach developed in this study), may provide rather accurate burnt scars detection, 90.5-98.5% in accuracy. Better than the burnt area product NASA which was 1.5-4.5% lower in accuracy than our results. 3. The findings and results of the study could serve as references to decision makers in tropical Africa to improve land management and control carbon emission to mitigating climate change.