Anton Vrieling

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Twente

Climate change and extreme weather events pose challenges to food security, emphasizing the need for reliable and timely monitoring of crop and rangeland conditions. For this purpose, long-term consistent Earth Observation datasets on vegetation conditions are typically used in early warning and crop yield forecast systems. However, the near-real-t...

The Budyko framework estimates macroscale evapotranspiration (ET) through hydrological partitioning, which determines what proportion of precipitation becomes ET or passes overland as runoff. This method has been widely used for modelling catchment ET and calibrating satellite-based ET algorithms at multi-annual timesteps, as it effectively account...

Accurately mapping crop types in smallholder farming regions is crucial for monitoring crop dynamics and estimating production but remains challenging, especially over large extents. Remote sensing based crop mapping studies in smallholder farming regions often focus on major crops and the challenge of mapping small fields. However, minor but possi...

The warming climate strongly impacts vegetation phenology, altering the terrestrial carbon cycle, biodiversity, and food production. Here, we analyzed satellite observations from 1982 to 2015 and found that approximately one-third of vegetated areas experienced a significant shift in the timing of the start of the growing season (SOS), with 65.5% e...

Globally, droughts are becoming longer, more frequent, and more severe, and their impacts are multidimensional. These impacts typically extend beyond the water balance, as long-term, cumulative changes in the water balance can lead to regime shifts in land cover. Here, we assess the effects of temporal changes in water supply and demand over multip...

Soybean is an important crop for food and animal feed. Production and area both continue to increase and expand into new areas and countries. Spatially explicit information on soybean cultivation is essential to crop monitoring, production estimation, and national accounting systems. However, its cultivation in diverse climate conditions, landscape...

This short book outlines the origins and evolution of an international award-winning development intervention, index-based livestock insurance (IBLI), which scaled from a small pilot project in Kenya to a design that underpins drought risk management products and policies across Africa. General insights are provided on (1) the economics of poverty,...

There is an urgent need for accurate and effective Landslide Early Warning Systems (LEWS). Most LEWS are currently based on temporally-aggregated measures of rainfall derived from either in-situ measurements or satellite-based rainfall estimates. Relying on a summary metric of precipitation may not capture the complexity of the rainfall signal and...

There is an urgent need for accurate and effective Landslide Early Warning Systems (LEWS). Most LEWS are currently based on a single temporally-aggregated measure of rainfall derived from either in-situ measurements or satellite-based rainfall estimates. Relying on a summary metric of precipitation may not capture the complexity of the rainfall sig...

In recent years, large-scale tree mortality events linked to global change have occurred around the world. Current forest monitoring methods are crucial for identifying mortality hotspots, but systematic assessments of isolated or scattered dead trees over large areas are needed to reduce uncertainty on the actual extent of tree mortality. Here, we...

Accurate and reliable information on the distribution of tsetse habitats is crucial for the effective management of African Trypanosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa. However, conducting large-scale surveillance of tsetse flies to develop distribution maps is impractical due to vast areas infested and limited resources available. To address this challe...

This is an OpenAccess publication. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2023.101565 Large-scale ecological restorations are recognized worldwide as an effective strategy to combat environmental degradation and promote sustainability. Remote sensing (RS) imagery, such as obtained from Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites, can provide spa...

Genetic engineers are attempting to meet increased global food demand by rewiring the pathway crops take to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) into yield. Most crops use the C 3 pathway. C 4 photosynthesis uses a biological pump that concentrates CO 2 , which makes it less resource demanding than C 3 photosynthesis. C 4 photosynthesis howe...

Evapotranspiration (ET) calculated as the residual of catchment water balance (ETWB) has often been used as a benchmark to evaluate satellite-based ET retrievals that use the energy-balance approach (ETEB). However, errors from water balance components will accrue in ETWB, leading to considerable disparities with ETEB. In this study, we set out to...

Controlling tsetse flies is critical for effective management of African trypanosomiasis in Sub-Saharan Africa. To enhance timely and targeted deployment of tsetse control strategies a better understanding of their temporal dynamics is paramount. A few empirical studies have explained and predicted tsetse numbers across space and time, but the resu...

Understanding grassland dynamics and their relationship to weather and grazing is critical for pastoralists whose livelihoods depend on grassland productivity. Studies investigating the impacts of climate and human factors on inter-seasonal grassland dynamics have focused mostly on changes to vegetation structure. Yet, quantifying the impact of the...

Climate is one of the key factors determining the suitability of land for agricultural production and influencing the spatial transition between grazing and cropping-dominated farming systems in Africa. We identified the climate indices that best align with the margin between the Agropastoral and Pastoral Farming Systems in the historical climate (...

The use of night-time livestock enclosures, often referred to as "bomas", "corrals", or "kraals", is a common practice across African rangelands. Bomas protect livestock from predation by wildlife and potential theft. Due to the concentration of animal faeces inside bomas, they not only become nutrient-rich patches that can add to biodiversity, but...

Determining the drivers of aboveground net primary production (ANPP), a key ecosystem process, is an important goal of ecosystem ecology. However, accurate estimation of ANPP across larger areas remains challenging, especially for savanna ecosystems that are characterized by large spatiotemporal heterogeneity in ANPP. Satellite remote sensing metho...

Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is the most expensive spice worldwide and is predominantly produced in the Khorasan Province situated in north-east Iran. Climatic shifts and lowering groundwater tables negatively affect saffron yields in this region, which are determined by environmental factors, agronomical practices, and crop age. Nonetheless, spatia...

Background African trypanosomiasis, which is mainly transmitted by tsetse flies (Glossina spp.), is a threat to public health and a significant hindrance to animal production. Tools that can reduce tsetse densities and interrupt disease transmission exist, but their large-scale deployment is limited by high implementation costs. This is in part lim...

Evapotranspiration (ET) accounts for water movements from land to air and plays a vital role in the terrestrial water, energy, and carbon cycles. Reliable estimates of ET for agricultural landscapes can facilitate water resources management and food security analysis. The widely used Priestley-Taylor Jet Propulsion Laboratory (PT-JPL) model has the...

Reversing ecological degradation through restoration activities is a key societal challenge of the upcoming decade. However, lack of evidence on the effectiveness of restoration interventions leads to inconsistent, delayed, or poorly informed statements of success, hindering the wise allocation of resources, representing a missed opportunity to lea...

Agricultural insurance is a valuable strategy to cope with extreme weather risks. Improved satellite observation capabilities can be particularly helpful with droughts, but will not translate into better insurance unless key challenges are overcome.

Delineation of shellfish beds through field surveys is time consuming. Remote sensing can help in detecting the location and boundaries of shellfish beds. This can be achieved through the use of aerial photographs and optical satellite sensors during cloud-free and low-tide conditions. Cloud penetrating radar is an alternative, but still requires c...

The frequent acquisitions of fine spatial resolution imagery (10 m) offered by recent multispectral satellite missions, including Sentinel-2, can resolve single agricultural fields and thus provide crop-specific phenology metrics, a crucial information for crop monitoring. However, effective phenology retrieval may still be hampered by significant...

In this manuscript, we present a remote sensing-based method to evaluate the impact of ecological restoration interventions on the supply of ecosystem services covering a period of over 30 year at a spatial resolution of 30 x 30 m. We integrated the Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) design with Landsat images, and applied this to an arid rural lan...

As climate-related crises increase globally, climate risk financing is becoming an integral part of financial protection and resilience building strategies of African countries. Drought-induced crises result in devastating human impacts and high costs for vulnerable countries, threatening longer-term investments and development efforts. While earth...

The short revisit times afforded by recently-deployed optical satellite sensors that acquire 3–30 m resolution imagery provide new opportunities to study seasonal vegetation dynamics. Previous studies demonstrated a successful retrieval of phenology with Sentinel-2 for relatively stable annual growing seasons. In semi-arid East Africa however, vege...

Planting a cover crop between the main cropping seasons is an agricultural management measure with multiple potential benefits for sustainable food production. In the maize production system of the Netherlands, an effective establishment of a winter cover crop is important for reducing nitrogen leaching to groundwater. Cover crop establishment afte...

Wetlands are among the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, due largely to their dynamic hydrology. Frequent observations by satellite sensors such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) allow for monitoring the seasonal, inter-annual and long-term dynamics of surface water extent. However, existing MODIS-based studies have onl...

Landscape processes fluctuate over time, influencing the intra-annual dynamics of ecosystem services. However, current ecosystem service assessments generally do not account for such changes. This study argues that information on the dynamics of ecosystem services is essential for understanding and monitoring the impact of land management. We studi...

Key messages • The African pastoral farming system consists of livestock and drylands crop-based production that supports an agricultural population of 38 million people of whom 13.4 million in sub-Saharan Africa are extremely poor. • Human population growth has resulted in low per capita livestock and land resources, and while the farming system h...

Satellites offer a privileged view on terrestrial ecosystems and a unique possibility to evaluate their status, their resilience and the reliability of the services they provide. In this study, we introduce two indicators for estimating the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems from the local to the global levels. We use the Normalized Differential...

The application of agricultural pesticides in Africa can have negative effects on human health and the environment. The aim of this study was to identify African environments that are vulnerable to the accumulation of pesticides by mapping geospatial processes affecting pesticide fate. The study modelled processes associated with the environmental...

For those developing satellite-based insurance products, there is no consensus in the scientific community on which of the many available indices most accurately track agro-ecological shocks as experienced by farmers and pastoralists. Furthermore, metrics commonly used by the remote sensing community for assessing the accuracy of indices in retriev...

Detailed knowledge on surface water distribution and its changes is of high importance for water management and biodiversity conservation. Landsat-based assessments of surface water, such as the Global Surface Water (GSW) dataset developed by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), may not capture important changes in surface water dur...

Recurrent drought represents a major threat in arid and semi-arid regions of East Africa where pastoralists depend on their livestock for subsistence. In Kenya and southern Ethiopia, an existing satellite-based index insurance scheme aims to protect pastoralists against the adverse effects of drought. Under that scheme, payouts are made based on an...

Background: The application of agricultural pesticides in Africa has potential negative effects on human health and the environment. To analyse these effects, spatial data quantifying the environmental fate of agricultural pesticides is needed. However, poor availability and quality of data that quantify pesticide application and pesticide fate lim...

The Sentinel satellite fleet of the Copernicus Programme offers new potential to map and monitor plant traits at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. Among these traits, leaf area index (LAI) is a crucial indicator of vegetation growth and an essential variable in biodiversity studies. Numerous studies have shown that the radiative transfer appro...

Leaf chlorophyll plays an essential role in controlling photosynthesis, physiological activities and forest health. In this study, the performance of Sentinel-2 and RapidEye satellite data and the Invertible Forest Reflectance Model (INFORM) radiative transfer model (RTM) for retrieving and mapping of leaf chlorophyll content in the Norway spruce (...

Detailed knowledge on surface water distribution and its changes is of high importance for water management and biodiversity conservation. Landsat-based assessments of surface water, such as the Global Surface Water (GSW) dataset developed by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), may not capture important changes in surface water dur...

Global food security is negatively affected by drought. Climate projections show that drought frequency and intensity may increase in different parts of the globe. Early season forecasts on drought occurrence and severity could help to better mitigate the negative consequences of drought. The objective of this study was to assess if interannual var...

Global food security is negatively affected by drought. Climate projections show that drought frequency and intensity may increase in different parts of the globe. These increases are particularly hazardous for developing countries. Early season forecasts on drought occurrence and severity could help to better mitigate the negative consequences of...

Detailed spatial information of changes in surface water extent is needed for water management and biodiversity conservation, particularly in drier parts of the globe where small, temporally-variant wetlands prevail. Although global surface water histories are now generated from 30 m Landsat data, for many locations they contain large temporal gaps...

Remote sensing studies of vegetation phenology increasingly benefit from freely available satellite imagery acquired with high temporal frequency at fine spatial resolution. Particularly for heterogeneous landscapes this is good news, given the drawback of medium-resolution sensors commonly used for phenology retrieval (e.g., MODIS) to properly rep...

Knowledge about changes in wildlife poaching risk at fine spatial scale can provide essential background intelligence for law enforcement and crime prevention. We assessed interannual trends and seasonal changes in elephant poaching risk for Kenya’s Greater Tsavo ecosystem for 2002 to 2012 using spatio-temporal Bayesian modeling. Poaching data were...

We analysed the performance and timeliness of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) in anticipating deviations from mean seasonal vegetation productivity in the Sahel. Gridded rainfall estimates are used to compute the SPI for 1–6-month timescales, whereas the Z-score of the cumulative value of the Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Activ...

To mitigate impacts of climate-related reduced productivity of French grasslands, a new insurance scheme bases indemnity payouts to farmers on a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived forage production index (FPI). The objective of this study is to compare several approaches for deriving FPI from satellite data to assess whet...

Inter-annual climatic variability over a large portion of sub-Saharan Africa is under the influence of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Extreme variability in climate is a threat to rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa, yet the role of ENSO in the balance between supply and demand of net primary productivity (NPP) over this region is unc...

Bayesian statistical methods are being used increasingly in crime research because they overcome data quality problems that arise due to the covert nature of crime, but the use of such methods is still in its infancy in the field of wildlife poaching—a specific form of crime. We analyzed poaching risk for African elephant (Loxodonta africana) by co...

Pastoralist households across East Africa face major livestock losses during drought periods that can cause persistent poverty. For Kenya and southern Ethiopia, an existing index insurance scheme aims to reduce the adverse effects of such losses. The scheme insures individual households through an area-aggregated seasonal forage scarcity index deri...

Background: To-date, Rift Valley fever (RVF) outbreaks have occurred in 38 of the 69 administrative districts in Kenya. Using surveillance records collected between 1951 and 2007, we determined the risk of exposure and outcome of an RVF outbreak, examined the ecological and climatic factors associated with the outbreaks, and used these data to dev...

Monitoring spatio-temporal dynamics of hydrology in seasonally-flooded wetlands is important for water management and biodiversity conservation. Spectral data and derived indices from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) have been used for hydrological monitoring of large wetlands. However, comparable studies for small wetlands...

Following more than 20 years of civil unrest, environmental information for southern Somalia is scarce. Wood charcoal production and export is a major activity supporting war regimes in this area such as the extreme Islamist group Al-Shabaab. However, little quantitative information exists on the extent of this charcoal production. In this study, w...

Global insurance markets are vast and diverse, and may offer many opportunities for remote sensing. To date, however, few operational applications of remote sensing for insurance exist. Papers claiming potential application of remote sensing typically stress the technical possibilities, without considering its contribution to customer value for the...

Droughts induce livestock losses that severely affect Kenyan pastoralists. Recent index insurance schemes have the potential of being a viable tool for insuring pastoralists against drought-related risk. Such schemes require as input a forage scarcity (or drought) index that can be reliably updated in near real-time, and that strongly relates to li...

Soil erosion by water occurs on sloped terrain when erosive rainfall and consequent surface runoff acts on soils that are not well-protected by vegetation or other soil protective measures. Both rainfall erosivity and vegetation cover are highly variable through space and time. Joint accounting for the variability of these factors is required to ef...

Satellite-derived surface solar radiation estimates are an alternative to the solar radiation measured at weather stations or modelled from other measured meteorological variables. The advantage of satellite-derived solar radiation is its high spatial and temporal resolution in comparison with solar radiation derived from weather stations, which ha...

Following more than 20 years of civil unrest, environmental information for Southern Somalia is scarce while there is clear evidence that the war economy fuelled by the conflict is rapidly depleting the country’s natural resources and especially the woody biomass. Wood charcoal production is one of the most relevant businesses supporting war regime...

Meeting the demand for food, energy, and water as world population increases is a major goal for the food systems of the future. These future challenges,which are complex, multiscalar, and cross-sectoral in nature, require a food systems approach that recognizes the socio-ecological and socio-technical dimensions of food (Ericksen, 2008; Ingram, 20...

Increasingly, research is moving towards more interdisciplinary endeavours. Effective collaboration between people from different disciplines is necessary to maximize the potential benefits of interdisciplinarity for future research activity. This paper analyses an approach to fostering the skills required for successful cross-disciplinary collabor...

Solar radiation is a key input variable for crop growth models. However, direct measurement of solar radiation is performed operationally for only a limited number of weather stations. Instead of direct measurements, empirical solar radiation models are used that link solar radiation to more commonly measured meteorological variables. Coefficients...

Consistent satellite image time series are increasingly accessible to geoscientists, allowing an effective monitoring of environmental phenomena. Specifically, the use of vegetation index time series has pushed forward the monitoring of large-scale vegetation phenology. Most of these studies derive key phenological metrics from the Normalized Diffe...

The spatial distribution of crops and farming systems in Africa is determined by the duration of the period during which crop and livestock water requirements are met. The length of growing period (LGP) is normally assessed from weather station data—scarce in large parts of Africa—or coarse-resolution rainfall estimates derived from weather satelli...

Frequent spatial reorganization of administrative units is common in many countries. It may comprise the merging or division of spatial units, or boundary changes between units. These reorganizations prevent the effective assessment of longer-term population dynamics at a detailed spatial level. To deal with this problem in the Netherlands, we deve...

Extreme weather conditions can strongly affect agricultural production, with negative impacts that can at times be detected at regional scales. In France, crop yields were greatly influenced by drought and heat stress in 2003 and by extremely wet conditions in 2007. Reported regional maize and wheat yields where historically low in 2003; in 2007 wh...

Food security exists when people have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food at all times to meet their dietary needs. The natural resource base is one of the many factors affecting food security. Its variability and decline creates problems for local food production. In this study we characterize for sub-Saharan Africa vegetation phenology...

Drought is one of the most frequent climate-related disasters occurring across large portions of the African continent, often with devastating consequences for the food security of agricultural households. This study proposes a novel method for calculating the empirical probability of having a significant proportion of the total agricultural area a...

Rainfall erosivity is a measure for the erosive force of rainfall. Rainfall kinetic energy determines the erosivity and is in turn greatly dependent on rainfall intensity. Attempts for its large-scale mapping are rare. Most are based on interpolation of erosivity values derived from rain gauge data. For data-poor regions this is not an option. This...

Variations in agricultural production due to rainfall and temperature fluctuations are a primary cause of food insecurity on the African continent. Analysis of changes in phenology can provide quantitative information on the effect of climate variability on growing seasons in agricultural regions. Using a robust statistical methodology, we describe...

Migration-environment linkages are at the centre of media attention because of public concern about climate change and a perceived “flooding” of migrants from less developed countries into more affluent parts of the world. In the past few years, a substantial body of conceptual literature about environmentally induced migration has evolved, but the...

Meeting the demand for food, energy, and water as world population increases is a major goal for the food systems of the future. These future challenges, which are complex, multiscalar, and cross-sectoral in nature, require a food systems approach that recognizes the socio-ecological and socio-technical dimensions of food (Ericksen, 2008; Ingram, 2...

Some of the most profound and direct impacts of climate change over the next few decades will be on agricultural production and the broader food system. Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to these impacts due to their under developed economies and the predominance of small farmer, subsistence agriculture. This paper focuses on understandi...