Thesis title: Effectiveness of the Management Models of Protected Areas in Southern Africa
Globally, protected areas are considered the primary conservation strategy to halt biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation, maintain healthy ecosystems, and provide essential resources and benefits to people. To achieve these goals, protected areas must be effective, representative, well-connected, and equitably managed, which includes reporting on the status of biodiversity, socio-economic issues, and the effectiveness of policy and management decisions. Monitoring and reporting whether protected area management strategies are effective in retaining and conserving biodiversity is at the center of the current Global Biodiversity Framework post 2020 together with the importance of socio-economic outcomes that promote governance and equity for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This project focused on how the existence and management objectives of protected areas shape the ecological and social context in Southern Africa, specifically South Africa and Mozambique.
Three chapters concern the Kruger National Park, one of the largest protected areas in Africa. To report on changes in woody vegetation in Kruger National Park, we used different tools with the objective of supporting park management and contributing to the systematic monitoring of biodiversity. First, as reported in Chapter 1, we developed a supervised learning workflow methodology using the cloud-based geospatial analysis platform Google Earth Engine to create the first historical map of the woody vegetation (i.e., trees and shrubs) using black and white high spatial aerial images from 1939/1944. Then, as reported in Chapter 2, we used recent aerial images from 2012 to analyze the spatio-temporal changes of the woody vegetation and landscape dynamics between two time periods 70 years apart: 1939/1944 and 2012. The results of the woody cover change analysis indicate that, overall, the cover has remained relatively stable between 1939/1944 and 2012 (increase of 2%, approx. 33,000 ha), with greater variability at a smaller scale (1km2), which may indicate that the increase in woody cover is highly dependent on local environmental and management factors. Looking in more detail at the landscape dynamics highlighted that the woody vegetation is decreasing and fragmenting in areas of high intensity fires and aggregating in areas where fires are limited due to the presence of large rivers and infrastructure, which reflect the complex dynamics influencing vegetation change and the importance of fire in limiting the increase of woody cover in the savanna ecosystem. The other main concern in Kruger National Park is the overall loss of large trees, so, as reported in Chapter 3, we used a land monitoring tool called Collect Earth to assess the distribution of tree cover and density and analyze the influence of environmental factors, including fire and elephant herbivory. The results highlight that the most important factors that shape the distribution of trees in the savanna ecosystem are geology and fire. As geological substrates cannot be altered, the findings underscore the importance of fire as a main factor in shaping the vegetation of savannas while also suggesting the lower impact of herbivory. Accessible, easy to use tools, that can be applied to systematically monitoring changes in the landscape, such as the ones described in Chapters 2 and 3 and made publicly available, are crucial, as the transformation of savanna grasslands into densely wooded areas, also referred to as woody encroachment, could lead to a loss of habitat and biodiversity, a change in plant species composition, alterations in fire regimes, and a decline in ecosystem services.
Reporting on the socio-economic outcomes of protected areas is a difficult task, especially in Mozambique because all protected areas except one have local communities living inside and in the buffer zones who depend on natural resources for their livelihood and well-being. In the final chapter, we present findings of a nationwide socio-economic survey in eight sites in Mozambique with different levels of protection and degrees of restriction and access, paying particular attention to the effect that the management and existence of protected areas have on the behaviors of local communities, which we refer to as the park effect. The results show that there are no significant differences on the households’ activities or on damages and human-wild conflict sustained by households, indicating that, overall, there does not seem to be a park effect independently of the level of protection of the individual protected area. This contradicts the assumption that resettling people outside of protected areas limits conflict and decreases the impact on wild plants and animals and shines light on the general lack of international consensus regarding the meaning of buffer zones and their conservation role for adjacent protected areas not only in Mozambique but globally.
Overall, the findings of this this project highlight (1) the importance of large area, long-term studies to assess the effectiveness of protected area management models and the urgency for efficient, accessible tools for monitoring global biodiversity targets, (2) the need to redirect the conservation discussion towards designating protected area categories based on both biodiversity objectives and social context and on clarifying the conservation objectives within the buffer zones of protected areas. This study supports the current Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework by creating an efficient monitoring tool for woody cover in savannas which can be applied in other countries and by acknowledging the priority of increasing the number and extent of protected areas globally while at the same time addressing the socio-economic and cultural context of local people.