Land Cover Change and Its Impacts on Land-Atmosphere Interactions in Africa: Bridging Critical Gaps Using a Mobile Field Lab

Land cover change is a major driver of anthropogenic climate change, contributing to increasing CO₂ emissions and altering the exchanges of water, energy, and gases between the land surface and the atmosphere. As these changes can subsequently affect both regional and global climate feedback mechanisms, much attention has been invested into their quantification. While global observation networks of biosphere-atmosphere interactions have provided valuable data in this context, their spatial coverage is uneven, with substantial data gaps in critical regions. Africa, despite its ecological and climatic importance, remains one of the least represented regions in these networks. Furthermore, the continent hosts diverse ecosystems—from arid deserts to wetlands—that deliver essential environmental services and undergo rapid land use changes due to both natural and anthropogenic factors. The scarcity of field measurements in Africa has resulted in a heavy reliance on satellite remote sensing, which often lacks high-resolution ground validation. For example, remote sensing analysis in South and East Africa reveals that the net difference between carbon sequestration and increasing shortwave radiation forcing in drylands undergoing afforestation is not spatially uniform. While some African drylands are expected to show a net cooling effect over an 80-year forest lifetime, others are expected to exhibit a net warming effect. We will deploy a mobile biosphere-atmosphere laboratory to gather direct ground-based measurements to validate such remote sensing estimates, in currently underrepresented areas. The mobile lab integrates advanced methodologies, including eddy covariance flux measurements, multispectral radiation sensors, soil and leaf gas analyzers, and sun-induced fluorescence. Our preliminary studies demonstrated that short-term campaign data combined with local, continuous meteorological data can produce seasonal and annual-scale assessments of water, carbon, and energy budgets. The combination of advanced field measurements with remote sensing validation will fill critical observational gaps in Africa and enhance predictions of ecosystem resilience under future climate scenarios.