Spatial-temporal Analysis of Wooded Grassland Ecosystem for Management of Wildlife Habitats using Landsat Imageries
FiBRE SERIES: Findings in Built and Urban Environments, July 2011
Dorothea Deus and Richard Gloaguen
“The study reports on spatial and temporal variation analysis of wooded grassland ecosystem as a contribution to sustainable management, conservation and monitoring of wooded grasslands ecosystem in Tarangire national park in Tanzania through mapping and analyzing the changes for a period ranging from 1979 to 2009.
“Documentation of loss or gain of wooded grassland as wildlife habitat in both time and space is crucial for their conservation and sustainable management.
“In order to accomplish the research, two categories of data were acquired as satellite based and ground truth data. Next to that, images were subjected into image processing operations to acquire the desired results. A supervised maximum likelihood classication algorithm was employed to categorize the wooded grassland ecosystem cover classes which were mapped from the satellite imagery namely woodland, grassland/shrub land, and barren. A post-classification change detection approach was applied to identify differences between scenes.
Tarangire National Park land cover maps 1979–2009
“The results obtained show that in 1979, the woodland cover occupied 52.82% (1515km2), grassland/shrub land 40.24%
(1154km2) and bare land 6.94%(199km2) of the total national park area in 1979. Checking on a direct 30 year difference 1979–2009, it was observed that the extent of woodland cover over the park has decreased substantially by 1230km2 (42.88%) while the shrub land cover has increased by 477km2 (16.63%) and 753km2 (26.25%) respectively.”
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