| Summary: | The evolution of land use between 1998 and 2018 in the Sambande Community Forest, which was set aside in 1999 and has been exploited for charcoal production since 2007, was assessed using Landsat satellite images, a household survey and floristic data collected in 2019. Mapping based on Landsat images shows that spontaneous vegetation has recovered significantly. This observation is shared by the population, with the proportion of respondents considering that spontaneous vegetation was abundant increasing from 14 % for 1998 (before the protection) to 66 % for 2018. This improvement in vegetation cover was expressed by an increase in shrub and tree savannahs. Between the two dates, the former increased from 43.1% to 52.1% of the study area and the latter from 11.3 % to 15.8 %. At the same time, degraded wooded savannah decreased significantly, from 33.5 % to 14.2 % of the total area. The decrease in degraded area is here the mark of a territory in reconstitution, hence the concordance with the survey. However, the floristic inventories give a different view, as the number of individuals and floristic diversity on the plots are not linked by a simple and close relationship to the apparent degree of recovery of the vegetation cover.Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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