Analysis of the Impacts of armed conflict on the Eastern Afromontane forest region on the South Sudan — Uganda border using multitemporal Landsat imagery

Impacts on the Urban Environment: Land Cover Change Trajectories and Landscape Fragmentation in Post-War Western Area, Sierra Leone

“…An earlier study by Forkuor and Cofie [9] and Mansaray et al's [7] investigation seem to disagree with Wilson's argument: they suggest that forced migration and mass infrastructure development have not only expanded the city limits due to competing demands for land from different stakeholders and that UPA farmers lost their land to higher bidders. Our analysis agrees with Forkuor and Cofie [9] and Mansaray et al's [7] research in Sierra Leone, specifically and with previous research on the impact of civil wars/conflicts on LCC in other locations [2,6,17]. Our results suggest that the accelerated rural-urban migration that occurred during the war has shaped the region's landscape, which is somewhat more fragmented now compared with before the war.…”

“…While UPA can be traced back to pre-independence Sierra Leone in the mountain villages of Gloucester and Leicester [50], it became widespread during the war, thus gaining policy attention after the war [26,51] These results agree with those of previous studies that have concluded that agricultural expansion, infrastructure development, and wood extraction are proximate drivers of LCC that are inextricably linked together [1,64,65]. This pattern has also been found by other studies that have examined the effect of civil war on the environment, like those in the South Sudan-Uganda border region and north Darfur, Sudan [2,17]. Our findings are consistent with other conflict-environment relationship research, which found deforestation through forest-based livelihood activities (fuel wood, charcoal) and informal settlement by IDP residents were major drivers of landscape change at the urban-bush interface [4,20].…”

“…The analysis of LCC trajectories and landscape fragmentation both at the class and landscape levels undertaken here has extended our understanding of LULCC in the WA [5, 7,9] and that of previous research on the impact of conflict on the environment [2,[11][12][13][14][15]. Our research provides the first detailed assessment of the extent and magnitude of landscape fragmentation and trajectory trends in the WA, findings that are useful to conservation planning and management efforts for WAPFoR.…”

“…Civil war and other forms of conflict that cause human displacement (hereinafter, conflict) are influential underlying drivers of human-induced landscape change [1][2][3]. Empirical geospatial research examining environmental impacts of human displacement resulting from conflict, especially when such displacement occurs within rather than across national boundaries, has increasingly identified significant environmental change in those environments.…”

Remote sensing for biodiversity monitoring: a review of methods for biodiversity indicator extraction and assessment of progress towards international targets

“…Data time series are necessary to detect deforestation. Landsat data have been primarily used in monitoring forest disturbance (Griffiths et al 2012;Schroeder et al 2011;Zhu et al 2012;Grinand et al 2013;Huang et al 2010;Gorsevski et al 2012;Renó et al 2011;Goodwin and Collett 2014), mainly due to the long archive, spectral and spatial resolution properties, and the free availability of data. Tasseled Cap Transformation (TCT) indices from Landsat near-annual time series, evaluated under trajectory-based change detection methods, resulted in identifying forest disturbances within 22 years with overall accuracy (OA) 95.72% (Griffiths et al 2012).…”