Land use and land cover change within and around the greater Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania
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Date
2020
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Science Publishing Group
Abstract
Land use and land cover (LULC) changes can pose profound impacts on wildlife habitats, abundance and distribution
and on human-dominated landscapes. We investigated LULC changes in the Greater Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania, for a period of
41 years from 1975 to 2015. Specifically, we mapped LULC types for 1975, 1995 and 2015 and assessed the corresponding changes
during 1975-1995, 1995-2015 and 1975-2015. We used the random forest classification algorithm to classify Multispectral Scanner
(MSS), Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (+ETM) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) into eight main
classes. We obtained accuracies of 88.4%, 90.6% and 93.4% with Kappa Indices of Agreement (KIA) of 0.86, 0.87 and 0.91 for
1975, 1995 and 2015, respectively. Grassland, shrubland and woodland were the major LULC types throughout 1975-2015 with
percentage coverages of 50.6%, 23.7% and 20.9% for 1975; 54.2%, 23.5% and 15.9% for 1995; and 57.0%, 23.8% and 8.9% for
2015, respectively. Overall, woodland cover (-11.1%) was converted to most of the other cover types during 1975-2015. The loss of
woodland cover is due to increasing human population size, agriculture, settlements and policy changes fires and elephant browsing.
Effective conservation policies and regulation of socio-economic activities in the ecosystem and its buffer area are essential to
ameliorate declining vegetation cover, especially along the protected areas boundaries.
Description
Journal Article
Keywords
GIS and Remote Sensing, Land use and cover change, Land cover transformation, Random forest classification, Serengeti ecosystem, Wildlife habitats