Abstract
The objective of the study was to detect and identify land cover changes in Laikipia County of Kenya that have occurred during the last three decades. The land use types of study area are six, of which three are the main and the other three are the minor. The main three, forest, shrub or bush land and grassland, changed during the period, of which grasslands reduced by 5864 ha (40%), forest by 3071 ha (24%) and shrub and bush land increased by 8912 ha (43%). The other three minor land use types were bare land which had reduced by 238 ha (45%), river bed vegetation increased by 209 ha (72%) and agriculture increased by 52 ha (600%) over the period decades. Differences in spatiotemporal variations of vegetation could be largely attributed to the effects of climate factors, anthropogenic activities and their interactions. Precipitation and temperature have been demonstrated to be the key climate factors for plant growth and vegetation development where rainfall decreased by 200 mm and temperatures increased by 1.5 °C over the period. Also, the opinion of the community on the change of land use and management was attributed to climate change and also adaptation strategies applied by the community over time. For example unlike the common understanding that forest resources utilisation increases with increasing human population, Mukogodo dry forested ecosystem case is different in that the majority of the respondents (78.9%) reported that the forest resource use was more in that period than now and also a similar majority (74.2%) had the same opinion that forest resource utilisation was low compared to last 30 years. In Yaaku community, change impacts were evidenced and thus mitigation measures suggested to address the impacts which included the following: controlled bush management and indigenous grass reseeding programme were advocated to restore original grasslands, and agricultural (crop farming) activities are carried out in designated areas outside the forest conservation areas (ecosystem zoning) all in consultation with government (political class), community and other stakeholders. Groups are organised (environmental management committee) to address conservation, political and vulnerability issues in the pastoral dry forested ecosystem which will sustain pastoralism in the ecosystem.
Highlights
An understanding of land use or land cover change at local, regional and global scales is important in an increasingly human dominated biosphere
Change detection is an important process in monitoring and managing natural resources, land use change analysis, monitoring of shifting cultivation and assessment of deforestation because it provides quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of the population of interest
As was visualised from the Google Earth image (Plate 1), there were a lot of spaces within the forest ecosystem and most of those spaces were earlier covered by grassland and in the recent past, these areas are covered by shrubs and woodland that had little value to pastoralist
Summary
An understanding of land use or land cover change at local, regional and global scales is important in an increasingly human dominated biosphere. Laikipia County is predominantly a livestock rearing county with ranches occupying over 50% of the entire land and 580 km of land covered by six gazetted and one non-gazetted forest These forests are either natural or artificial in establishment, for instance Mukogodo dry forest is one of natural forests not gazetted at the lee ward side of Mount Kenya and inhabited by an indigenous and minority community known as the Yaaku. Some factors such as forest fires, deforestation and grazing have largely led to depletion of the forest cover over the years. In Mukogodo, ecotourism is a dominant activity through conservation of natural forests at Iligwesi, kurikuri and lekuruki community conservancies
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