Abstract
Nowadays, adaptive management of protected areas is lacking objective and integrated indicators for rigorous assessment of their evolutionary trends and the effectiveness of the conservation methods on the basis of conservation objectives and landscape dynamics. The study provides a methodological approach for determining trend indices and historical evolutionary trends which describe the developments of the Rusizi Park known to be the most threatened protected area in Burundi. The study is based on the diachronic analysis of land cover using multi-date Landsat images from 1984, 1990, 2011, 2000 and 2015 and field data. The supervised classification of the images made it possible to identify 9 to 10 land cover classes with contrasting evolutions. The park's matrix, which was made of wooded savannah in 1984 with 43.78%, consists of shrub savannah and cultivated areas occupying 25.87% and 25.40% by 2015. The results showed that during the periods 1984-1990, 1990-2000, 2000-2011 and 2011-2015, the park experienced alternating positive and negative evolutions whose trend indices are Ti [(38, 6); 2D]; Ti [(65, 22); 3D]; Ti [(78, -82); 4a] and Ti [(58, -36); 3c]; the second and the third periods being the most devastating and beneficial ones for conservation. Finally, between 1984 and 2015, the park undergone a negative evolution of trend index Ti [(77, -64), 4b] characterized by “a very strong evolution (4) with “a strong negative trend (b) which is represented by spatial transformations affecting 77% of the park, consisting of 82% degradation and 18% increase, resulting in a negative result of 64%. During that time, the park lost 29.9% of the vegetation cover and 31.2% of water resources in favor of anthropized areas, which increased by 94.5%. The decline of the vegetation cover is dominated by savannah and forest loss dynamics. Land cover changes are mainly caused by anthropogenic pressures and the variability of climatic conditions. They are due to six spatial processes which are dominated by patch creation and patch attrition. The results also revealed a high degree of coherence between spatial processes, class dominance and trend indicators. In general, class dominance decreases are linked to patch degradation processes and vice versa. Patch degradation processes such as fragmentation lead to negative evolutions if they affect vegetation and positive developments when they affect anthropized zones and vice versa, for patch development processes like enlargement.
Highlights
The Rusizi National Park is known to be the only protected area in Burundi that has an international status as a Ramsar site
From 2000 to 2011, the decline of the anthropized classes in general and of the cultivated areas in particular and the important recovery of the vegetation cover are explained by the insecurity in a large part of the park following the presence of armed bands, the gradual repatriation of displaced from war in 1993 and excess rainfall
At the global scale of the study (1984-2015), it experienced a very high degree of degradation which was characterized by a strong regression of the vegetation cover in favor of the anthropized zones which are dominated by cultivated and burned areas
Summary
The Rusizi National Park is known to be the only protected area in Burundi that has an international status as a Ramsar site. It is the most threatened protected area and the most unstable [1, 2]. It is necessary to evaluate the evolution and the strategies for the conservation of the protected area using objective and rigorous indicators. As shown, by some studies, monitoring and characterizing the evolution of protected area habitats and ecosystems are essential strategies for fruitful biodiversity management [7, 8, 9]
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