Objectives

SUN works to improve management and increase sustainability of the vegetation resources that are essential to local people’s livelihood in arid and semi-arid West Africa.

SUN is composed of 10 workpackages (WPs) that focus on three major activities:

~ Action-oriented research specifically targeted towards management. The objectives are to improve the understanding of vegetation dynamics and their causal factors at local scale (see WP1) and to extrapolate these results from local to regional (West African) scale by use of a database of scientifically gathered vegetation data and remote sensing (see WP2). Local knowledge and socio-economic studies will identify economic instruments to improve policies and redress impediments to sustainable use (see WP3).

~ Development of new decision support tools in order to organise and target already available scientific data and make them freely available via the internet. This includes a vegetation database (see WP4), an overview of indicators of sustainable use (see WP5) and a GIS tool (see WP6). These tools will be developed for decision makers and scientists, who need a sound scientific basis for management decisions.

~ Establishment of practical management and restoration actions in selected areas – planned in close collaboration between scientists and local people and carried out by local people with support from scientists (see WP7 and WP8).

SUN has a WP that takes care of dissemination at all levels (WP9) and one (WP10) takes care of project administration and coordination.

SUN was finalised in 2010, but some of the activities are continued under related projects:

Undesert (www.undesert.neri.dk) and QialiTree (www.qualitree.neri.dk).