Leveraging browse and grazing forage estimates to optimize index-based livestock insurance.

African pastoralists suffer recurrent droughts that cause high livestock mortality and vulnerability to climate change. The index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) program offers protection against drought impacts. However, the current IBLI design relying on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) may pose limitation because it does not consider the mixed composition of rangelands (including herbaceous and woody plants) and the diverse feeding habits of grazers and browsers.

Dietary micronutrients intake and its effect on haemoglobin levels of pregnant women for clinic visit in the Mount Cameroon health area: a cross-sectional study.

Background: Nutritional deficiencies and its consequences such as anaemia are frequent among pregnant women residing in under resource settings. Hence, this study sought to investigate specific dietary micronutrient inadequacy and its effect on maternal haemoglobin levels.

Methods: This institution based cross-sectional survey enrolled 1,014 consenting pregnant women consecutively.

Study becomes insight: Ecological learning from machine learning.

The ecological and environmental science communities have embraced machine learning (ML) for empirical modelling and prediction. However, going beyond prediction to draw insights into underlying functional relationships between response variables and environmental 'drivers' is less straightforward. Deriving ecological insights from fitted ML models requires techniques to extract the 'learning' hidden in the ML models.

Woody-biomass projections and drivers of change in sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa's ecosystems have an important role in global carbon dynamics, yet consensus is lacking regarding the amount of carbon stored in woody vegetation and the potential impacts to carbon storage in response to changes in climate, land use, and other Anthropocene risks. Here, we explore the socio-environmental conditions that shaped the contemporary distribution of woody vegetation across sub-Saharan Africa and evaluate ecosystem response to multiple scenarios of climate change, anthropogenic pressures, and fire disturbance. Our projections suggest climate change will have a small but negative effect on above ground woody biomass at the continental scale, and the compounding effects of population growth, increasing human pressures, and socio-climatic driven changes in fire behavior further exacerbate climate-driven trends.