Woody vegetation of a mosaic of protected areasadjacent to the Kruger National Park, South Africa

Abstract

Abstract Question: How is pattern detected and spatial scale defined in a manner that is meaningful to management? Location: Protected areas to the west of the Kruger National Park, South Africa. Methods: A Two-Way Indicator Species Analysis (TWINSPAN) based on composition and structure was applied to woody survey data. The resulting TWINSPAN classes for individual monitoring sites were used in a supervised classification of Landsat ETM+ imagery across the study area. The training sample's co-ordinates were fed into a GIS and the resulting TWINSPAN point-feature shape file was processed using a 1 km theme-buffer function. Results: The supervised classification using the theme-buffer signatures yielded a satisfactory overall accuracy (κ = 0.75; r2 = 0.80; p = 0.05) using a test sample compiled by reserve wardens throughout the study area. The derived vegetation map was smoothed using a majority filter and after on-screen digitizing a small gabbro intrusion, it was accepted as the best representation of the...