Abstract
Increasing demand for food in East Africa has created a shift to utilize wetlands for food production. Lack of spatial information hampers sustainable use of the Kilombero Valley floodplain. We take advantage of multispectral data from RapidEye, Landsat-8, and Sentinel-2 to derive high temporal resolution maps along three hydrological zones of the Kilombero Valley, assess seasonal land cover dynamics, and relate these dynamics to groundwater measurements. The depth of groundwater increases from June and declines from December, consistent with the end and the beginning of the rainy season, respectively. Bare land cover over the study area was 45% to 57% and increases to 62% to 69% as the season shifts from rainy to dry seasons while vegetation coverage, which was 34% to 47%, decreased to 25% to 27%. During the dry season, 68% to 81% of the total vegetation is within the riparian zone indicating the hydrological conditions favor plant growth. Vegetation growth in the fringe and middle zones mainly relies on precipitation whereas that in the riparian zone relies on saturation from the river. Our findings exemplify the relationship between seasonal land cover change and hydrological conditions and contribute to improved understanding of the spatial–temporal land cover dynamic in the Kilombero floodplain, required for planning sustained use of the wetland.
Highlights
Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to account for 20% of the world population by 2050.1 Land remains under increasing pressure driven by urbanization and population growth
The support vector machine (SVM) classification algorithm was applied to multitemporal multispectral RapidEye, Sentinel-2, and Landsat satellite imagery (Figs. 5 and 6)
The overall classification accuracies for the RapidEye, Sentinel-2, and Landsat ranged from 70% to 96, and the Cohen’s–Kappa coefficients ranged from 0.61 to 0.95 (Table 1)
Summary
Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to account for 20% of the world population by 2050.1 Land remains under increasing pressure driven by urbanization and population growth. The need for land to expand agricultural production has led to deforestation and encroachment in protected areas such as wetlands, negatively affecting the regulatory functions of the ecosystem. Agricultural production systems are adversely affected by climate variability and climate change causing extreme weather events (increase of amount and variability of rainfall and increase of temperature) and changing seasons.[2,3,4] Low crop productivity due to water stress and degradation of soil fertility is among the consequences of the changing climate. Expansion of agricultural land in the floodplain is restricted due to the existence of protected areas, i.e., the Kilombero Game Controlled Area, the Selous Game Reserve, and the Udzungwa National Park. Changing climatic patterns affects agricultural production causing extreme periods of dryness, floods, and changes in seasonality
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