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WorldView-2 Detail A Seno Plain, Mali story

Agriculture
  1. Seno Plain, Mali
  2. WorldView-2 Detail
Description

On the edge of the Seno Plain, up against the Bandiagara escarpment, a brighter red appears in a few areas. This is denser tree cover and vegetation near a seasonal watercourse. But it’s not all tree cover.

There is farmland under those trees in a farming strategy called recessive farming, that is, farming when flood waters recede after the rainy season. So the red seen in the Landsat imagery is not only from the trees but also from crops. The trees are darker red tones, and crops are light red.

An image from the WorldView-2 satellite shows much more detail, 1.8-meter resolution. Plots of farm fields occupy most of this close-up image. Individual trees are the bright red spots. Villages are the bluish-gray patches.

While WorldView-2 does not offer the frequent repeat coverage of Landsat, it does help show enough detail to see whether tree coverage is changing over time. Click this image to see an enlarged view.

View Related Imagery & Stories

Location

Oct. 26, 2016, Landsat 8 (path/row 196/50) — Seno Plain, Mali

Oct. 26, 2016, Landsat 8 (path/row 196/50) — Seno Plain, Mali

Oct. 4, 2011, WorldView-2 — Seno Plain, Mali

Oct. 4, 2011, WorldView-2 — Seno Plain, Mali

Oct. 26, 2016, Landsat 8 (path/row 196/50) — Seno Plain, Mali
Oct. 4, 2011, WorldView-2 — Seno Plain, Mali

Seno Plain, Mali Additional Imagery & Stories

Cattle Corridors
Cattle Corridors

Some of the dark lines in the images might look like roads. Those lines are a transportation network of sorts, just not transportation for people. The...

Read More
Corona and WV-2
Corona and WV-2

To get an even more detailed view of this region, we can actually go back to satellite imagery from 1967. This pre-Landsat imagery, while black-and-wh...

Read More
Cropland
Cropland

These close-up images from Landsat show the Seno Plain in a bit more detail. The images were acquired during the dry season, so crops were not growing...

Read More
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