BayCEER Workshop 2015

Analysing land cover and land use change in the Matobo National Park and surroundings in Zimbabwe

Natural forests are threatened worldwide, therefore their protection in National Parks is essential. Here, we investigate how this protection status affects the land cover. To answer this question, we analyse the surface reflectance of three Landsat images of Matobo National Park and surrounding in Zimbabwe from 1989, 1998 and 2014 to detect changes in land cover in this region. To account for the rolling countryside and the resulting prominent shadows, a topographical correction of the surface reflectance was required.

Due to missing ground data, we produce a land cover map for 2014 and transfer it to the other two images. Therefore we locate unchanged pixels with the change vector analysis and cluster the image with k-means, whereby the best number of classes were determined to be 4 or 5. The land cover for the resulting classes were derived from photographs and Google Earth. The classified pixels serve as training data for supervised classification, which is carried out for each image separately. Subsequently the three different classifications are compared and land changes are mapped.

Here, we present preliminary results. First analyses show that the main land cover changes are located in the surrounding areas whereas the vegetation in the national park seems to remain unchanged.