Land use/land cover change and its impacts on protected areas in Mengla County, Xishuangbanna, Southwest China

Abstract

Land use/land cover change (LUCC) in tropical areas threatens biodiversity and protected area integrity and then affects global ecosystem functions and services. In this study, the spatiotemporal patterns and processes of LUCC in Mengla County, Xishuangbanna, which is located on the northern edge of tropical Asia, were examined using a modified post-classification change detection technique based on random forest classifiers and Landsat images acquired at a 5-year time interval (e.g., 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014) from 1994 to 2014, with a special focus on protected areas and their surroundings. The overall accuracies of land use/land cover classification reached 90.13-97.90%, with kappa coefficients of 0.84-0.96. Massive but decelerating conversion from forests to artificial plantations has occurred in recent decades. From 1994 to 2014, the area of plantations increased by 1833.85 km, whereas that of forests decreased by 1942.67 km. The expanded areas of artificial plantations decreased from 158.41 km per year in 1994-1999 to 59.70 km per year in 2009-2014. More considerable transformation from forests to artificial plantations occurred in lowland areas with elevations below 1000 m and at the edges of National Nature Reserves, which observed a forest loss rate of greater than 40% between 1994 and 2014. This poses serious challenges for sustaining both protected areas and surrounding human communities and to solve the increasingly escalating human-elephant conflicts. The complex food, biodiversity, and land use nexus in this region remain to be untangled in future study.

Spatiotemporal pattern of forest degradation and loss of ecosystem function associated with Rohingya influx: A geospatial approach

“…While various works have revealed the extent of forest loss in response to Rohingya settlement, none of them have examined impact on ecosystem functions resulting from forest loss. Since natural resources such as forests provide a range of ecosystem services, clearing of forest (i.e., land use changes due to the refugee crisis) is highly detrimental to the integrity of the ecosystem and damages biodiversity (Jin & Fan, 2018; Tilman et al, 2017). In addition, forest clearance enhances carbon emission (Heiskanen, Adhikari, Piiroinen, Packalen, & Pellikka, 2019; Shi et al, 2019) and fragmentation of landcover damages biodiversity (Yu et al, 2020).…”

Exploring the historical evolution of tourism-environment interaction in protected area: A case study of Mt. Bogda

“…Long-term monitoring of the spatial changes of construction lands in the Bogda area showed that tourism development influences the ecosystem and accelerates the evolution process of tourism-environment interaction. The higher land-use intensity of tourism construction influenced the landscape fragmentation, diversity, stability, primitive, and nature degree in protected areas, as suggested in previous research (Xie et al, 2012;Huong et al, 2014;Mao et al, 2014;Yuan and Fan, 2018;Li G D et al, 2020). However, tourism development might not have been the main driver of the degradation of the Bogda area ecosystem, as shown by the following two reasons.…”

A review of land use/land cover change mapping in the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor countries

“…The review also illustrated that the number of classes, landscape types, and classification algorithms has an impact on classification accuracy (Congalton & Green, 1999;Olofsson et al, 2014). For instance, Jin and Fan (Jin & Fan, 2018) obtained the highest overall accuracy of 97.90% by applying RF and Landsat images when they classified only five land cover types. In contrast, Li et al, (2017a) acquired the lowest accuracy rate of 75% when classifying 19 types of LU and LC.…”