Abstract
Protected areas are an important means of controlling deforestation. However, the effectiveness of protected areas in controlling deforestation depends on type of protected area which determines conservation policy pursued and thus how the protected area is managed. This paper reports on analysis of the relationship between deforestation and type of protected area, namely forest reserve, game reserve and national park in mainland Tanzania. The analysis used maps covering the whole of mainland Tanzania for 1995 and 2010 and applied GIS analytical techniques. Both forest reserves and game reserves had lower deforestation than areas that were not protected whereas national parks had higher deforestation than areas that were not protected. However, forest reserves had higher rate of deforestation than game reserves. These results raise questions with regards to ecological processes and policy options relevant for the three types of protected areas and their effects on deforestation. First, are the differences in deforestation due to varying levels of effectiveness of measures used to control deforestation among the three types of protected areas? Second, what is the role of natural processes such as elephants that kill trees? Third, why should national parks be associated with the highest rate of deforestation? Are forests so bad for wild animals in national parks? These questions form the basis of the discussion of the results.
Highlights
Protected areas are an important means of protecting forests against deforestation and its consequences [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
According to the calculations based on the pixels involved in the statistical analysis in this study the total areas covered by forest reserves, game reserves and national parks were respectively 420,602.37 ha, 280,084.29 ha and 214,644.04 ha
The highest amount of variation in deforestation was explained by the model comparing game reserves against national parks and the lowest was for the model comparing forest reserves to national parks (Table 2)
Summary
Protected areas are an important means of protecting forests against deforestation and its consequences [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The number of protected areas in the world increased more than tenfold resulting in 1.9 billion hectares under protected areas globally [8] In view of this importance of protected areas, the government of Tanzania put under protected areas of different types about 43% of all forested land in the country by the 1990s [9]. Comparative studies that have evaluated the effectiveness of protected areas across the world suggest that the creation of protected areas has had mixed outcomes especially in terms of preventing deforestation [4, 10, 11] This is due to a number of ecological, socioeconomic and institutional factors including type of protected area [4, 10, 11]
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