Expected climate change might have significant consequences for Sub-Saharan countries (IPCC, 2007). Today approximately 50% of the African population depends on dry-land use on various forms of vegetation cover.

Climate plays a crucial role for land use management, thus climate scenarios for the coming decades on a local scale could decisively help to alleviate these problems by

• helping individual farmers in adapting their cultivars to maintain productivity and income;
  
  
• upholding the functionality of agroforestry systems in the region and
  
  
• giving the right directions of the overall planning in the socio-economic development of project countries.

The study of our working group aims at provision of the vegetation data base required for models on two spatial scales (local and national) using field inventory data and remote sensing.

Currently available data sets cover mainly small scales using satellite sensors of type Landsat, AVHRR, MODIS or Spot Vegetation. There are still knowledge gaps regarding classification of different crop land and savannah types because remote sensing application is usually limited to assigning land cover classes where at least 40% of the surface is covered by a target cover type. Tree, shrub and grass savannahs and shrub lands are, therefore, often in the non-forest vegetation class, depending, of course, on the spatial resolution of the imagery.

The study focuses on 50 Reference Areas (RA) in Burkina Faso with square areas of 10 x 10km. 6 - 9 reference areas are intensively observed by all subprojects.