Preprint
Review

Withdrawn:

Evaluating Disturbance in Relation to Ecosystem Fragmentation: A Case of Nyungwe National Park in Rwanda

Altmetrics

Downloads

9

Views

43

Comments

0

Submitted:

06 September 2020

Posted:

07 September 2020

Withdrawn:

10 September 2020

Alerts
Abstract
Ecosystems including national parks are being put under pressure and a myriad of socio-environment challenges experiencing from human activities. Hence, planning and practicing a new conservation policy requires a simultaneous evaluation of the intensity of human disturbance. To move forward, we considered Nyungwe National park as the present study by using ArcGIS methods, we analyzed human disturbance and relationship to dynamic change in NDVI with Landsat data from 1990 to 2018. The high disturbance was distributed in the extremity part, and a decreased in vegetation health was noted in highly disturbed regions while a sustainable ecosystem appeared in no disturbed region. Using FRAGSTAT software, two-level of the selected landscape patterns were computed to evaluate fragmentation, by defining the direction of community's involvement in conservation. Fragmentation in class metric correlated with a decline in grassland area by 2.9% due to uncontrolled urbanization which experiences inappropriate exploitation of natural resources. Landscape metric improved the area of the park, as the significance of strong protection policies, however, the high degree of subdivision among patches, and low connectivity implied disturbance, which evidenced weak participation of residents into conservation activities. The results of this study would serve a baseline for policy and decision making toward collaboration into ecosystem conservation.
Keywords: 
Subject: Environmental and Earth Sciences  -   Environmental Science
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
Prerpints.org logo

Preprints.org is a free preprint server supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

Subscribe

© 2024 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated