Reducing emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in Angola: Insights from the scarp forest conservation ‘hotspot’

Abstract

The depletion of forests in conservation hotspots is a poorly known societal concern of the post‐conflict society of Angola. Rapid economic and population growth, fragile environmental regulation, enforcement, and planning threat these invaluable forests and their biodiversity. By mitigating climate change through a sustainable management of forests, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) could also favour the preservation of biodiversity. This study addresses the depletion of forests in Angolan conservation ‘hotspots’ under a REDD+ perspective. In the escarpment forest, a centre of endemism, activity data, and emission factors were assessed between 2001 and 2014. Next, spatial factors associated with deforestation were identified using generalized linear modelling, and it was provided a view on how REDD+ may support sustainable forest management in conservation hotspots. Activity data based on an error‐corrected estimate indicated a deforested area of 4856.3 ± 653.1 ha between 2001 and 2014. Field mean above‐ground carbon content amounted to 89.4 ± 126.4 tCha‐1. Among the most relevant factors associated with deforestation were elevation, density of bare land, north–south exposure (aspect), and distance to trails. All negatively related to deforestation. Overall, the threatened escarpment forest conservation hotspot seems to have significant potential for reducing carbon emissions and beneficiate from REDD+. Yet the considerable uncertainty in our estimates limited the discussions in the magnitude of forest depletion and carbon emissions. In view of performance‐based payments for development, additional field surveying is necessary to boost the accuracies presented by new forest monitoring tools that can reduce technical difficulties and sustain the eligibility of Angola for international REDD+ funding sources.

Remote sensing for monitoring tropical dryland forests: a review of current research, knowledge gaps and future directions for Southern Africa

“…However, the dryland forests of Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zambia are noticeably very poorly studied. Studies on the dryland forests of Angola are even less frequent, receiving relatively little global attention, and the few studies conducted on its forests were mostly conducted by researchers from Portuguese Universities (Leite et al 2018, Catarino et al 2020. The focus of publications tended to be biased towards conservation and national parks, particularly as a large proportion of studies were undertaken in the Kruger NP, leaving many other private and international protected areas relatively understudied.…”

Assessing the Importance of Tree Cover Threshold for Forest Cover Mapping Derived from Global Forest Cover in Myanmar

“…This software enabled us to interpret the land cover of the sampled area with plot layout design through imageries with varying spatial and temporal resolutions within Google Earth, Bing Maps, and Google Earth Engine [47]; it geo-synchronized the views of the ground situation at each sample within different imageries (Figure 2a-c). Previous studies used Collect Earth for various purposes, including ground truth data collection for accuracy assessment, land cover change analysis, and vegetation survey, for analyses at global scale [48] and specific regions of interest [49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56].…”

The Avifauna of Angola: Richness, Endemism and Rarity

“…Reports on the birds of particular areas, such as Cangandala National Park (Mills et al 2008) and the Soyo area (Dean and le Maitre 2008;Stavrou and Mills 2013) are valuable in that there is a large gap in time between when the places were last surveyed for birds and now. The avifauna of many areas is known only from collections of specimens during the 1950s and there have been significant and rapid changes in landuse in many areas after the war, such as with the conversion of old-growth miombo woodland for charcoal making, or the replacement of secondary forest and shade-forest coffee plantations by slash-and-burn agriculture in the Scarp (Leite et al 2018), the most important area of bird endemism (Cáceres et al 2017). Reports on the avifauna of Mount Moco (Mills et al 2011a, b), the Namba Mountains (Mills et al 2013a, b), and Lagoa Carumbo (Mills and Dean 2013) have highlighted the bird species richness of these areas and, inter alia, noted threats to the local ecosystems and their (Mills and Cohen 2007), Black-tailed Cisticola Cisticola melanurus (Mills et al 2011a, b), Bocage's Sunbird Nectarinia bocagii (Mills 2013), and the Red-necked Falcon Falco chicquera (Mills et al 2016), have provided some insights into the biology of these species.…”