Portfolio Problem 1
September 18th, 2020
Interpretation of Results
According to my analysis, Less Strictly Protected (LSPA) parks experienced more deforestation than Strictly Protected (SPA) parks from 2000 to 2019. Moreover, the data visualization showed important signs of deforestation around the frontiers of almost all protected areas (PAs) in Rwanda. LSPAs in Rwanda lost approximately 0.104 percent of pixels with more than 30 percent cover in comparison to the year 2000 baseline, whereas SPAs registered about 0.037 percent loss.
Nevertheless, these figures may be skewed by different assumptions made when categorizing the different protected areas (PAs) into SPAs or LSPAs. For example, SPAs may have this designation bureaucratically, but could lack enforcement to control access and limit deforestation of the land. Moreover, different categories of PAs may be administered by different local or regional authorities with different agendas, making allocation of resources, enforcement of boundaries, and control of extraction of resources inconsistent even within the same country. Likewise, PAs with STATUS “Not Reported” could also belong to SPAs, although we still classify them as a LSPAs.
Finally, the standards for what would be considered a healthy, or a forest in general vary as an effect of latitude and altitude. Hansen et al. (2013), report forest loss from the tropical domain at a threshold of > 50% of tree cover, whereas this analysis used a 30% threshold. Using a higher threshold would allow for higher sensibility to detect forest loss given that Rwanda is in the tropical domain. Therefore, the calculations of forest loss presented in this analysis are rather conservative, if not utterly underestimated. Thus, accounting variability in altitude and latitude and its impact on primary productivity would allow us to determine a more appropriate threshold to calculate forest cover loss on a given area.
Maps
Link to GEE code
https://code.earthengine.google.com/4d26e49d14674d8b94b9d5d11e70c209