Protection reduces loss of natural land-cover at sites of conservation importance across Africa
Protection reduces loss of natural land-cover at sites of conservation importance across Africa
This poster was produced and presented at the ZSL Institute of Zoology symposium Protected Areas – are they safeguarding biodiversity? The symposium held on November 8 and 9th 2012 aimed to provide a synthetic analysis of the world’s protected area portfolio. A key theme was to identify components of the current portfolio: how is it funded, managed and monitored, and to ask how protected areas have performed from a biodiversity conservation perspective.
The authors of this study quantified the effectiveness of protection in reducing land cover change in African Important Bird Areas (IBAs) using a dedicated visual interpretation of change from higher resolution satellite imagery. Using point based sampling, they identified the loss or retention of natural land cover across IBAs and in a 20 km buffer around each IBA.
Collaboration / Project(s)
Do Protected Areas work? Assessing long-term land-cover change in priority sites for conservation in Africa using remote sensing.
Land-cover change is perhaps the single greatest threat to biodiversity. The Protected Area (PA) network aims to protect key sites, including from adverse land-cover change and represents one of the major pillars of global biodiversity conservation. Despite the significance attached to PAs, including their central role in CBD reporting, their effectiveness in preventing anthropogenic land-cover…