Analyses of Land Cover Change Trajectories Leading to Tropical Forest Loss: Illustrated for the West Kutai and Mahakam Ulu Districts, East Kalimantan, Indonesia

Wiwin Effendy,Arif Budiman,Arif Kusuma,Stefan Dekker,André Faaij,Pita Verweij,Carina van der Laan,Judith Verstegen

doi:10.3390/land7030108

Abstract

In Indonesia, land cover change for agriculture and mining is threatening tropical forests, biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, land cover change is highly dynamic and complex and varies over time and space. In this study, we combined Landsat-based land cover (change) mapping, pixel-to-pixel cross tabulations and expert knowledge to analyze land cover change and forest loss in the West Kutai and Mahakam Ulu districts in East Kalimantan from 1990–2009. We found that about one-third of the study area changed in 1990–2009 and that the different types of land cover changes in the study area increased and involved more diverse and characteristic trajectories in 2000–2009, compared to 1990–2000. Degradation to more open forest types was dominant, and forest was mostly lost due to trajectories that involved deforestation to grasslands and shrubs (~17%), and to a lesser extent due to trajectories from forest to mining and agriculture (11%). Trajectories from forest to small-scale mixed cropland and smallholder rubber occurred more frequently than trajectories to large-scale oil palm or pulpwood plantations; however, the latter increased over time. About 11% of total land cover change involved multiple-step trajectories and thus “intermediate” land cover types. The combined trajectory analysis in this paper thus contributes to a more comprehensive analysis of land cover change and the drivers of forest loss, which is essential to improve future land cover projections and to support spatial planning.

Highlights

Land developments for agriculture and mining in tropical forest landscapes have a strong negative impact on forests, biodiversity and ecosystem services, where they cause a decline in carbon stocks, the provision of food and the resilience of livelihoods of local communities [1,2,3,4]
We aim to present an integrated approach, combining land cover map analyses and expert knowledge to characterize, quantify and map land cover change processes and trajectories that have contributed to forest loss, forest degradation and displacement of mixed croplands at the local to landscape scale
The land cover map comparisons showed that in 1990, most of the land in the West Kutai and Mahakam Ulu districts was covered with forest (~2.9 Mha; ~88%) and that about 9% of this forest area was lost between 1990 and 2009 (Figure 2, Figure S2, Table S2)

Summary

Introduction

Land developments for agriculture and mining in tropical forest landscapes have a strong negative impact on forests, biodiversity and ecosystem services, where they cause a decline in carbon stocks, the provision of food and the resilience of livelihoods of local communities [1,2,3,4]. The governments at the district, provincial and national levels are all involved in decision-making processes with regard to land use allocation, spatial planning and handing out of concession permits for land development, but can have different and contrasting interests [22] Due to these varying local conditions and decisions, land cover change does vary spatially, and temporally, and is characterized by a sequence of changes, defined as trajectories [24,25,26,27,28,29]. To effectively apply specific tropical forest conservation interventions in a certain area, it is important to account for both local spatial and temporal variability of land cover change and to analyze land cover change processes and trajectories at the local to landscape scale (e.g., [25,29,30])

Objectives

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion