Integrating evidence of land use and land cover change for land management policy formulation along the Kenya-Tanzania borderlands

Mustaphi, Colin J. Courtney; Capitani, Claudia; Boles, Oliver; Kariuki, Rebecca; Newman, Rebecca; Marchant, Rob; Lane, Paul

doi:10.1016/j.ancene.2019.100228

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 261 publications

(197 reference statements)

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“…Scientific and research communities in northern Tanzania are increasingly interested in the current and future challenges around climate change, population growth and land use transitions. The development of generalized LULCC knowledge summaries, generated from diverse sources, communicated to several audiences, can be useful for supporting dialogues to frame issues around sustainable and inclusive development [44,75]. Generalized knowledge, however, poses significant challenges to developing sustainable future development pathways for northern Tanzania because the area is characterized by varying environmental gradients, biodiversity, livelihood strategies, economic development, historical trajectories, and land uses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recognizing the importance of stakeholder knowledge and the challenges of exploring future outcomes of top-down LULCC policy on societies and the environment [35,44], this paper uses local stakeholder perspectives on recent and anticipated future LULCC in northern Tanzania to address three objectives. Firstly, to identify important drivers of past and present LULCC and to construct a timeline (1959 onwards) of key events that have shaped LULCC.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Integrating stakeholders’ perspectives and spatial modelling to develop scenarios of future land use and land cover change in northern Tanzania

et al. 2021

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Rapid rates of land use and land cover change (LULCC) in eastern Africa and limited instances of genuinely equal partnerships involving scientists, communities and decision makers challenge the development of robust pathways toward future environmental and socioeconomic sustainability. We use a participatory modelling tool, Kesho, to assess the biophysical, socioeconomic, cultural and governance factors that influenced past (1959–1999) and present (2000–2018) LULCC in northern Tanzania and to simulate four scenarios of land cover change to the year 2030. Simulations of the scenarios used spatial modelling to integrate stakeholders’ perceptions of future environmental change with social and environmental data on recent trends in LULCC. From stakeholders’ perspectives, between 1959 and 2018, LULCC was influenced by climate variability, availability of natural resources, agriculture expansion, urbanization, tourism growth and legislation governing land access and natural resource management. Among other socio-environmental-political LULCC drivers, the stakeholders envisioned that from 2018 to 2030 LULCC will largely be influenced by land health, natural and economic capital, and political will in implementing land use plans and policies. The projected scenarios suggest that by 2030 agricultural land will have expanded by 8–20% under different scenarios and herbaceous vegetation and forest land cover will be reduced by 2.5–5% and 10–19% respectively. Stakeholder discussions further identified desirable futures in 2030 as those with improved infrastructure, restored degraded landscapes, effective wildlife conservation, and better farming techniques. The undesirable futures in 2030 were those characterized by land degradation, poverty, and cultural loss. Insights from our work identify the implications of future LULCC scenarios on wildlife and cultural conservation and in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets by 2030. The Kesho approach capitalizes on knowledge exchanges among diverse stakeholders, and in the process promotes social learning, provides a sense of ownership of outputs generated, democratizes scientific understanding, and improves the quality and relevance of the outputs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Integrating stakeholders’ perspectives and spatial modelling to develop scenarios of future land use and land cover change in northern Tanzania

et al. 2021

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“…Several lines of evidence support rapid (decadal scale) changes to vegetation cover on Kilimanjaro's slopes. Future work should integrate several lines of evidence from paleoecology, archaeology, history, and the social sciences (Courtney Mustaphi et al, 2019) to further examine the relative importance of hydroclimate, fire, plant competition strategies, local topography, herbivory, and anthropogenic interactions that influence spatial heterogeneity in the vegetation biogeography on Kilimanjaro.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The high biodiversity and relatively lower degree of mountain endemism that characterizes the flora of Kilimanjaro is hypothesized to have been driven in part by millennia of anthropogenic activity (Hemp, 2006a), but further archaeological and historical ecology research is required if we wish to elucidate how people have used mountain resources over time and how anthropogenic activities have been modifying Kilimanjaro ecosystems during its long history of human-ecosystem interaction. As for much of eastern Africa, the potential consequences of land use on mountain areas remain unexplored and will require linked and colocated archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and paleoenvironmental inquiry (Marchant et al, 2018; Capitani et al, 2019; Courtney Mustaphi et al, 2019; Cuní-Sanchez et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tropical wetlands are key for biodiversity, carbon cycling, and hydrological ecosystem services (Kamukala and Crafter, 1993; Kolka et al, 2016), yet wetlands are rapidly changing across Africa owing to land-use management regimes, hydroclimatic variability, defaunation, and introduced taxa (Ministry of Environment and Mineral Resources, 2012; Davidson, 2014). Given the current rapidity and magnitude of environmental transformations driven by global climate change and intensifying anthropogenic pressures on landscapes that threaten biodiversity (Stévart et al, 2019), the utility of long-term socioecological insights are increasingly used for contextualizing land-management dialogues and supporting public policy decisions (Marchant and Lane, 2014; Courtney Mustaphi et al, 2019; Said et al, 2019). High-elevation wetlands accumulate sediments over geologic timescales and are important geoarchives of past environmental conditions, especially in environments with few lake sediment deposits (Marchant et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A 3000-year record of vegetation changes and fire at a high-elevation wetland on Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

et al. 2020

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Kilimanjaro is experiencing the consequences of climate change and multiple land-use pressures. Few paleoenvironmental and archeological records exist to examine historical patterns of late Holocene ecosystem changes on Kilimanjaro. Here we present pollen, phytolith, and charcoal (>125 μm) data from a palustrine sediment core that provide a 3000-year radiocarbon-dated record collected from a wetland near the headwaters of the Maua watershed in the alpine and ericaceous vegetation zones. From 3000 to 800 cal yr BP, the pollen, phytolith, and charcoal records show subtle variability in ericaceous and montane forest assemblages with apparent multicentennial secular variability and a long-term pattern of increasing Poaceae and charcoal. From 800 to 600 cal yr BP, montane forest taxa varied rapidly, Cyperaceae abundances increased, and charcoal remained distinctly low. From 600 yr cal BP to the present, woody taxa decreased, and ericaceous taxa and Poaceae dominated, with a conspicuously increased charcoal influx. Uphill wetland ecosystems are crucial for ecological and socioeconomic resilience on and surrounding the mountain. The results were synthesized with the existing paleoenvironmental and archaeological data to explore the high spatiotemporal complexity of Kilimanjaro and to understand historical human-environment interactions. These paleoenvironmental records create a long-term context for current climate, biodiversity, and land-use changes on and around Kilimanjaro.

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Late Pleistocene montane forest fire return interval estimates from Mount Kenya

Mustaphi

Rucina

Marchant

2022

J Quaternary Science

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Past forest fire events and fire frequencies are reconstructed with sediment-charcoal records at lake catchment spatial scales. Few quantitative palaeofire analyses exist in tropical montane forests, where fire return intervals are long (decadal and centennial scales) because of the infrequency of fire weather and fuel conditions. Fire return intervals are a key characteristic of fire regimes and changing fire frequencies rapidly alter land cover compositions and vegetation structure. Charcoal records from small lakes with relatively small catchments covered with dense forest provide an opportunity to reconstruct low-frequency, high-severity fires through a time series decomposition approach to identify charcoal peaks above a varying background rate as a proxy for palaeofire events. The sediment core from Rumuiku wetland on Mount Kenya, equatorial eastern Africa, accumulated a nearly linear age-depth model and provided a high temporal resolution (10 years cm -1 ) sieved charcoal count record (>125 µm). Pollen analysis showed a significant change in montane forest assemblage occurred at 21 200 cal a BP from a montane forest with abundant Podocarpus and Juniperus to a forest with more abundant Hagenia. This change in forest altered the vegetation composition and structure with concomitant changes to the fire regime. Forest biomass in the Hagenia forests decreased and it is likely that fire activity qualitatively changed toward lower intensity and lower severity fires. The quantitative fire event reconstruction focuses on the interval from 27 000 to 16 500 cal a bp and the older montane forest that experienced higher severity fires from 27 000 to 21 200 cal a BP, which reconstructed a temporally heterogeneous fire regime with fire return intervals that ranged from 30-430 years and a mean of 120 years (median 160 years) in the catchment. These are the first estimates of fire return intervals of mountain forests in eastern Africa. We then explore the potential for further comparative research and incremental research contributions to improve quantitative and qualitative palaeofire research in tropical forest ecosystems. We discuss the potential to use these types of data for characterizing variables of fire regimes prior to ostensibly significant modification by anthropogenic activity as well as during the recent past as human land use pressures increased within Afromontane forests.

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Integrating evidence of land use and land cover change for land management policy formulation along the Kenya-Tanzania borderlands

Cited by 13 publications

References 261 publications

Integrating stakeholders’ perspectives and spatial modelling to develop scenarios of future land use and land cover change in northern Tanzania

Integrating stakeholders’ perspectives and spatial modelling to develop scenarios of future land use and land cover change in northern Tanzania

A 3000-year record of vegetation changes and fire at a high-elevation wetland on Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

Late Pleistocene montane forest fire return interval estimates from Mount Kenya

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