I’ve been adding summaries to posts, just to keep the people that don’t click through interested. I believe there is a tldr bot somewhere in lemmy too. @tldrbot@lemmy.world

Across the continent-from Senegal and Niger in the west to Ethiopia in the east, and Malawi in the south- smallholder farmers are rejecting government advice that trees should be expunged from fields because they get in the way of growing crops.

The latest published evidence of Africa’s resurgent farmland trees comes in the first-ever detailed analysis of satellite images of the continent carried out at a scale that can identify individual large trees outside forests.

These often previously unmapped trees are not in plantations; they are mostly natural trees scattered across savanna grasslands, croplands, and pastures.

They say that the algorithm used by Reiner and colleagues may spot bigger trees but fails to count the huge number of small trees that they have been mapping on the continent’s farms by using a combination of human visual analysis of remote-sensing images and simply driving around counting trees.

Chris Reij, a dryland restoration specialist at the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC, has seen firsthand how millions of farmers across Niger, southern Mali, and Ethiopia have begun nurturing natural regrowth of hundreds of millions of trees from long-suppressed roots beneath their fields.

The farmers especially cherish the winter thorn tree, which grows widely across Africa.

Reij says that at a recent meeting of African government officials, held in Malawi to discuss how to improve forest cover across the continent, “No one, including the Malawian hosts, even mentioned the 8 million acres of cultivated land with on-farm trees across that country.”