Land use and land cover change within and around the greater Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania

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dc.creatorKija, Hamza Khalid
dc.creatorOgutu, Joseph Ochieng
dc.creatorMangewa, Lazaro Johana
dc.creatorBukombe, John
dc.creatorVerones, Francesca
dc.creatorGraae, Bente Jessen
dc.creatorKideghesho, Jafari Ramadhani
dc.creatorSaid, Mohammed Yahya
dc.creatorNzunda, Emmanuel Fred
dc.date2022-08-25T12:24:15Z
dc.date2022-08-25T12:24:15Z
dc.date2020
dc.date.accessioned2022-10-25T08:50:42Z
dc.date.available2022-10-25T08:50:42Z
dc.descriptionJournal Article
dc.descriptionLand 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.
dc.formatapplication/pdf
dc.identifier2328-5788
dc.identifier2328-580X
dc.identifierhttp://www.suaire.sua.ac.tz/handle/123456789/4465
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/123456789/90533
dc.languageen
dc.publisherScience Publishing Group
dc.subjectGIS and Remote Sensing
dc.subjectLand use and cover change
dc.subjectLand cover transformation
dc.subjectRandom forest classification
dc.subjectSerengeti ecosystem
dc.subjectWildlife habitats
dc.titleLand use and land cover change within and around the greater Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania
dc.typeArticle

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