Linking Land‐Use Scenarios, Remote Sensing and Monitoring to Project Impact of Management Decisions

Abstract

AbstractLarge‐scale modifications of natural ecosystems lead to mosaics of natural, semi‐natural and intensively used habitats. To improve communication in conservation planning, managers and other stakeholders need spatially explicit projections at the landscape scale of future biodiversity under different land‐use scenarios. For that purpose, we visualized the potential effect of five forest management scenarios on the avifauna of Kakamega Forest, western Kenya using different measures of bird diversity and GIS data. Future projections of bird diversity combined: (1) remotely sensed data on the spatial distribution of different forest management types; (2) field‐based data on the biodiversity of birds in the different management types; and (3) forest management scenarios that took into account possible views of various stakeholder groups. Management scenarios based on the species richness of forest specialists were very informative, because they reflected differences in the proportions of near‐natural forest types among the five scenarios. Projections based on community composition were even more meaningful, as they mirrored not only the proportions of near‐natural forest types, but also their perimeter to area ratios. This highlights that it is important to differentiate effects of the total area of available habitat and the degree of habitat fragmentation, both for species richness and community composition. Furthermore, our study shows that an approach that combines land‐use scenarios, remote sensing and field data on biodiversity can be used to visualize future biodiversity. As such, visualizations of alternative scenarios are valuable for successful communication about conservation planning considering different groups of stakeholders in species‐rich tropical forests.