Monitoring land cover changes in African protected areas in the 21st century

Africa is home to some of the most vulnerable natural ecosystems and species on the planet. Around 7000 protected areas seek to safeguard the continent’s rich biodiversity, but many of them face increasing management challenges. Human disturbances permeating into the parks affect directly and indirectly the ecological functioning and integrity of protected areas. With the envisaged expansion of the protected area network and the further expected population and economical growth, the competition between nature conservation and resources demands are likely to exacerbate. The regular monitoring of land cover in and around protected areas can support the timely detection of conservation conflicts. In this paper, we analyse the use of the annual time series of MODIS land cover (MODIS LC) type product between 2003 and 2009 to monitor land cover changes at continental scale. We use the mean classification confidence and change frequency as indicators to assess the temporal consistency of the MODIS LC classifier for accurately monitoring land cover changes. We discuss the perspectives for a regular and automated monitoring of land cover changes in African protected areas

GROSS Dorit;  DUBOIS Gregoire;  PEKEL Jean-François;  MAYAUX Philippe;  HOLMGREN Milena;  PRINS Herbert;  RONDININI Carlo;  BOITANI Luigi; 

2013-03-07

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

JRC73435

1574-9541,   

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954112001197,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC73435,   

10.1016/j.ecoinf.2012.12.002,