PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
November 2014
1007
(over 120,000 individ-
uals). The communal
lands in the basin
(orga-
nized and managed as
community-based orga-
nizations) are primarily
used for subsistence ag-
riculture, cattle grazing,
and photographic and
hunting safaris.
Our research pro-
posed that understand-
ing underlying biophys-
ical drivers of change
by taking into account
different management
regimes in the two coun-
tries and establishing
the relative importance
of flooding and fire re-
gimes in driving veg-
etation dynamics rep-
resented an important
step in understanding
landscape-level change
at the regional level. By
using remote sensing to
map and then analyze
the spatial and temporal variability of fire and flooding re-
gimes across political boundaries, this research contributes to
enhancing our understanding of local adaptation mechanisms
to future environmental change in the context of increasing
temperatures, decreasing precipitation trends and increasing
frequencies and intensities of El Niño episodes in southern Af-
rica (Boko et al., 2007). These continuing changes are likely to
have a series of strong impacts on other components in semi-ar-
id ecosystems that will, in turn, affect their ecology, structure,
and function, making it imperative that we monitor and work
on understanding drivers, impacts and effects of such changes.
F
ire
R
egimes
C
hanges
in
A
frica
’
s
L
argest
T
ransfrontier
C
onservation
A
rea
Fires are an intrinsic component of many ecosystems through-
out the world; and for the semi-arid savannas of southern
Africa, they are one of the controlling factors in maintaining
the balance between grassy and woody vegetation (Bond and
Keeley, 2005). Understanding the role of fires in driving eco-
system dynamics through the influence of fire on land cover
change, atmospheric composition, and the global carbon cycle
is a key focus within the global change research community.
The C
4
grasslands, shrubs and woodlands of the savannas of
Southern Africa, which are among the most frequently burnt
ecosystems in the world, are an expression of fire disturbanc-
es at various recurrence rates in the landscape (Bond et al.,
2004).
Specifically in our on-going work on fire regime change
analyses, we ask whether different fire management policies
result in changes in the annual extent of burned area in the
protected areas (PA) in five countries of the Kavango Zambezi
Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA). To address this ini-
tial question, we created a fire return interval (FRI) map for
the central KAZA region (Figure 1) for the last decade to un-
derstand the general trends in fire frequency and seasonality
between neighboring countries with different fire policies and
management and to test whether there is an increasing trend
The expressed purposes for the creation
of KAZA by the member countries were
tri-fold: to improve the cooperative
management of shared resources, to
increase the area available for wildlife and
plant populations, and to bring economic
benefits to the local communities
adjacent to protected areas.
Figure 1. Location of the study area in southern Africa (Source: Pricope 2013).
