Household level influences on fragmentation in an African park landscape

Abstract

2016-11-02T18:49:00

Population pressure and global markets drive a decade of forest cover change in Africa's Albertine Rift

“…While tea cooperatives are simply smaller in size, and tend not to require the massive fertilizer 6 inputs and tilling that, for example, U.S. industrial corn production uses, their establishment nonetheless results in substantial and lasting conversion of the landscape (Hartter and Southworth 2009, Hartter et al 2011, Ryan and Hartter 2012, Ryan et al 2015. Although tropical forest conversion for meat production is well known as an Amazonian frontier problem (Alves et al 2009), in Africa, an increasingly affluent and urban population, driving higher meat consumption, likely impacts land cover and land use changes in the Albertine Rift.…”

Changes in vegetation persistence across global savanna landscapes, 1982–2010

“…Significant areas of native tropical and subtropical grasslands in Australia and South America were replaced by improved pastures, using mainly domesticated African grasses enhanced with fertilizer application in the post-WWII period (McIvor, Guppy, & Probert, 2011;White, Murray, & Rohweder, 2001). African landscapes already contain a degree of fine-scale fragmentation evident in recent ecological mapping (Ryan et al, 2015;Tchuente, De Jong, Roujean, Favier, & Mering, 2011) due to long coexistence with human populations using shifting cultivation and livestock herding. Food demand, fertilizer availability, and markets for multinational agribusiness point to potential major industrial-scale agricultural conversion in Africa in the twenty-first century (Laurance, Sayer, & Cassman, 2014).…”

Spatial Overlap Between People and Non-human Primates in a Fragmented Landscape

“…Sites were defined as remnant forests (without the protected status that KNP holds) in use by both primates and humans (Table 1). In this region, forest fragments provide important human livelihood resources such as building materials, traditional medicine, water, and fuelwood (Naughton-Treves et al 2007;Naughton-Treves et al 2011;Goldberg et al 2012;Ryan et al 2015). However, for primates that reside within the KNP landscape matrix, fragmentation has deleterious effects including reduced health, enhanced cross-species microbial transmission, and local extirpations of primate populations (Goldberg et al 2008).…”

“…These conflicts are especially pronounced in fragmented habitats (Murcia 1995;Wade et al 2003;Fischer and Lindenmayer 2007;Ryan et al 2015). Habitat fragmentation negatively impacts the wellbeing of wildlife (Bennett and Saunders 2010), particularly for species at higher trophic levels (Michalski and Peres 2005).…”