The Sahel Flashcards
What is the Sahel region?
The Sahel region is a semi-arid belt of barren, sandy and rock strewn land.
What does the Sahel mark?
The Sahel marks the physical and cultural transition between the continent’s more fertile tropical regions to the south and its desert in the north.
Where is the Sahel?
The Sahel stretches from Senegal on the Atlantic coast, through parts of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Sudan to Eritrea on the Red Sea coast. The Sahel is a shoreline between the middle east and Sub-Saharan Africa
What biome is The Sahel?
The semiarid steppes of the Sahel have natural pasture, with low-growing grass and tall, herbaceous perennials (Savannah biome).
What did The Sahel used to be like?
The thorny scrub once formed a woodland, but the country is now more open and relatively traversable by motor vehicle.
What is a big negative in the Sahel?
Little continuous cover and a dangerous tendency to merge into desert because of overstocking and over farming.
How many months of the year are dry in the Sahel region?
At least eight months of the year are dry, and rain, confined to a short season, averages 4–8 inches (100–200 mm), mostly in June, July, and August.
Wide areas of pasturage are watered by….
The flooding of the Niger and Senegal rivers.
What happened in the second half of the 20th century in the Sahel?
In the second half of the 20th century, the Sahel was increasingly afflicted by soil erosion and desertification resulting from growing human populations that made more demands upon the land than previously.
Some past events in the Sahel regions are….
Town dwellers and farmers stripped the tree and scrub cover to obtain firewood and grow crops.
long period of drought, beginning in 1968.
led to the virtual extinction of the crops there and the loss of 50 to 70 percent of the cattle.
1972 there was practically no rain at all, and by 1973 sections of the Sahara had advanced southward up to 60 miles (100 km).
loss of human life by starvation and disease was estimated in 1973 at 100,000.
Severe drought and famine again afflicted the Sahel in 1983–85.
desertification progressed despite some government reforestation programs.
The Sahel continued to expand southward into neighbouring savannas, with the Sahara following in its wake.
