Fredrik Hannerz

Small unmonitored near-coastal catchment areas yielding large mass loading to the sea

Continental freshwater transports and loads excess nutrients and pollutants from various land surface sources into downstream inland and coastal water environments. This study shows that even small ...

Spatial Characterization of the Baltic Sea Drainage Basin and Its Unmonitored Catchments

Abstract We present an updated, harmonized hydrologic base map of the entire Baltic Sea Drainage Basin (BSDB), including 634 subdrainage basins. The updated map has a level of detail approximately 5 to 10 times higher than the current standard and includes various spatial-aggregation possibilities of relevance for water management. All 634 subdrainage basins and their various spatial aggregations are characterized in terms of population, land cover, drainage density, and slope. We identify, quantify, and characterize, in particular, drainage basins that are unmonitored with regard to the combination of water-flow and nutrient-concentration measurements needed to monitor coastal nutrient and pollutant loading. Results indicate that out of a total BSDB population of 84 239 000 in 2002, 24% lived in unmonitored coastal drainage basins that cover 13% of the total BSDB area. A more detailed analysis of Swedish catchments indicates that Sweden has a particularly large proportion of unmonitored coastal catchment areas (20% of the total Swedish area) with high population pressures (55% of the total Swedish population), when compared with average conditions for the whole BSDB. In general, the investigated characteristics of unmonitored coastal basins vary and differ largely from those in adjacent monitored drainage basins within the BSDB.

Assessment of remotely sensed and statistical inventories of African agricultural fields

This paper critically examines different sources of remotely sensed and statistical inventories of African agricultural fields. Substantial discrepancies are found across alternative sources of information in both the extent and location of agricultural fields. In one‐third of the countries, the difference between lowest and highest field extent estimate exceeds 25% of the total country area, and the maximum difference at the continental level is 2.6 million km2. Much of the disagreement between land‐cover maps arises from areas of low cropping density. These inconsistencies have important implications when using these data directly, e.g. for the assessment of land cover changes, or indirectly in economic or physical models, and indicate a need to explicitly quantify uncertainties arising from the limitations in land‐cover data. They also highlight the need for development of regional land information systems for baseline development and informed policy decisions.