European exploration of Africa

The geography of North Africa has been reasonably well known among Europeans since classical antiquity in Greco-Roman geography. Northwest Africa (the Maghreb) was known as either Libya or Africa, while Egypt was considered part of Asia. European exploration of sub-Saharan Africa begins with the Age of Discovery in the 15th century, pioneered by the Kingdom of Portugal under Henry the Navigator. The Cape of Good Hope was first reached by Bartolomeu Dias on 12 March 1488, opening the important sea route to India and the Far East, but European exploration of Africa itself remained very limited during the 16th and 17th centuries. The European powers were content to establish trading posts along the coast while they were actively exploring and colonizing the New World. Exploration of the interior of Africa was thus mostly left to the Muslim slave traders, who in tandem with the Muslim conquest of Sudan established far-reaching networks and supported the economy of a number of Sahelian kingdoms during the 15th to 18th centuries. At the beginning of the 19th century, European knowledge of the geography of the interior of sub-Saharan Africa was still rather limited. Expeditions exploring Southern Africa were made during the 1830s and 1840s, so that around the midpoint of the 19th century and the beginning of the colonial Scramble for Africa, the unexplored parts were now limited to what would turn out to be the Congo Basin and the African Great Lakes. This "Heart of Africa" remained one of the last remaining "blank spots" on world maps of the later 19th century (alongside the Arctic, Antarctic, and interior of the Amazon Basin). It was left for 19th-century European explorers, including those searching for the famed sources of the Nile, notably John Hanning Speke, Richard Francis Burton, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley, to complete the exploration of Africa by the 1870s. After this, the general geography of Africa was known, but it was left to further expeditions during the 1880s onward, notably, those led by Oskar Lenz, to flesh out more detail such as the continent's geological makeup.

Hydrological modelling of the Zambezi River Basin taking into account floodplain behaviour by a modified reservoir approach

Anton Schleiss, Théodora Cohen Liechti, David Ferràs Segura

Floodplains are regions of great interest for environmental assessment as they constitute important ecological reserves and contribute efficiently to natural flood attenuation. However, the implementation of a model describing the basic hydrological behavi ...

2014

Etude empirique de l'utilisation de la géolocalisation en collaboration mobile

Pierre Dillenbourg, Nicolas Nova

Cet article décrit une application de géolocalisation de groupe en environnement construit. Ce système constitue une plateforme d’exploration de l’impact des technologies de positionnement spatial sur les processus de collaboration entre partenaires géographiquement dispersés. L’article présente la plateforme ainsi que les premiers résultats d’une étude testant deux interfaces : l’une affichant avec le positionnement des partenaires et l’autre sans. Les reésultats ne montrent pas de modification au niveau de la performance. Par contre les participants qui n’avaient pas ce positionnement communiquent plus et font beaucoup moins d’erreurs quand on leur demande de se remémorer le chemin parcouru par les partenaires.

2005