Analysing land use and land cover changes in the Ruma National Park and surroundings in Kenya

Valeska Scharsich1, Dennis Ochuodho Otieno2, Christina Bogner1
1 Ecological Modelling, University of Bayreuth
2 Department of Botany, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology, Kenya; Plant Ecology, University of Bayreuth

P 4.4 in Land-use effects on ecosystems

Introduction

The control of the tsetse fly, biological vector of trypanosomes, is an important factor in the growth of the human population in certain African regions. Since the huge efforts of tsetse control in the 1970s, the population of the Lambwe valley in Kenya increased rapidly and therefore the cultivated area expanded. This lead to a high pressure on the Ruma National Park that occupies one third of the Lambwe valley. Here, we investigate how this pressure affects the land cover of the National Park and how the surrounding area changed.

Material and Methods

To answer this question, we analyse the surface reflectance of three Landsat images of Ruma National Park and its surroundings from 1984, 2002 and 2014. To compensate for the lack of ground data we inferred past land use and land cover from recent observations combining Google Earth images and change detection. By supervised classification with Random Forests, we identified four land use and land cover types, namely two types of forest, shrub land, and bare light soils with little vegetation, fields and settlements. Subsequently we compared the three land use and land cover classifications and mapped changes.

Results

Here, we present some preliminary results. First analyses show that the main changes are observable in the National Park. The proportion of one forest type seems to decreases by about 10% and the proportion of the bare land class increases about 10%. These changes could indicate an actual effect of the pressure on the National Park.

 

 



Keywords: change of land use and land cover, remote sensing, Ruma National Park
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