Dust from soil erosion due to wind can affect human health, traffic, and, on a larger scale, climate. Investigators¹ compared different models that quantify how the wind energy spreads over an herbaceous surface using data from the Sahel region of Africa, where estimates of dust emissions² remain uncertain. They found that the modeling tools give results in reasonable agreement, indicating that vegetation can decrease the amount of dust emitted from soil erosion by 6% to 26% in mass compared with bare soil. "This study is a step towards a better quantification of dust emissions in the Sahel, where wind erosion can be a major issue," said Dr. Caroline Pierre, lead author of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface study. "The importance of such work is reinforced by the strong change in Sahelian land uses over the last decades."