An assessment of land cover change as a source of information for conservation planning in the Vhembe Biosphere Reserve

Abstract

Determining changes in land use/land cover (LULCC) can be used to assess and monitor habitat loss as one of the five global priority causes of biodiversity loss. In South Africa, two national land-cover (NLC) datasets have been developed from satellite imagery obtained in circa 1990 and 2013/2014. The Vhembe Biosphere Reserve (VBR), designated in 2009, is located in the north of the Limpopo Province in South Africa and has a surface area of 30,457 km2. The aim of biosphere reserves is to provide a landscape-scale framework for conservation and sustainable development of an area. The area within a biosphere reserve is prioritised by designating it into one of three zones 1) Core, 2) Buffer, and 3) Transitional Zones. Two national parks and six provincial reserves (PAs) are the current and form part of the proposed updated core areas (pCAs) of the VBR. Intensity analyses was used to assess LULCC in the VBR. The pCAs cover 39.7% of the surface area of the VBR. The PAs cover 39.7% and only 15.8% of the surface area of the pCAs and VBR respectively. Based on the NLC 2013/2014 a majority of the VBR, pCAs and PAs consisted of indigenous vegetation dominated by Woodland/Open bush, Grassland, and Thicket/Dense bush. The extent of transformed land in the VBR declined from 1990 to 2013 by 1697.7 km2. The total amount of change and mean annual change in the VBR was 53.1% and 2.31% respectively. The overexploitation of fuel wood by rural communities in rural areas of the VBR, was partly responsible for the targeted loss of Woodland/Open bush to Thicket/Dense bush and Grasslands. The unquantified presence of novel vegetation and alien invasive plants means that the NLC 1990 and 2013/2014 overestimates the quantity and distribution of the remaining indigenous vegetation in the VBR. In order to address this the distribution of alien and indigenous invasive plant species in the VBR needs to be determined and used to update future NLCs. Assuming a worse-case-scenario of all the coal deposits in the VBR, including the Kruger National Park, being mined it would amount to 24.7% of the surface area of the VBR. Only 6.8% of the area of all the coal deposits in the VBR was transformed with 93.2% currently remaining untransformed. It is recommended that transformation of indigenous vegetation to one of the seven transformed land cover categories and more specifically from coal mining should be restricted to the VBR's Transition Zones.