Monitoring and simulating landscape changes: How do long-term changes in land use and long-term average climate affect regional biophysical conditions in southern Malawi?

Nkolokosa, Clinton, Stothard, Russell ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9370-3420, Jones, Chris ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6504-6224 and Stanton, Michelle ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1754-4894 (2023) 'Monitoring and simulating landscape changes: How do long-term changes in land use and long-term average climate affect regional biophysical conditions in southern Malawi?'. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, Vol 195, e1247.

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Abstract

We set out to reveal the effects of long-term changes in land use and long-term average climate on the regional biophysical environment in southern Malawi. Object oriented supervised image classification was performed on Landsat 5 and 8 satellite images from 1990 to 2020 to identify and quantify past and present land use-land cover changes using a Support Vector Machine classifier. Subsequently, using 2000 and 2010 land use-land cover in an artificial neural network, land use-land cover for 2020 driven by elevation, slope, precipitation and temperature, population density, poverty, distance to major roads and distance to villages data was simulated. Between 1990-2020, area of land cover increased in built-up (209%), bare land (10%) and cropland (10%) and decreased in forest (30%), herbaceous (4%), shrubland (20%) and water area (20%). Overall, the findings reveal that southern Malawi is dominantly an agro-mosaic landscape shaped by the combined effects of urban and agricultural expansions and climate. The findings also suggest the need to enhance the machine learning algorithms to improve capacity for landscape modelling and ultimately, prevention, preparedness and response to environmental risks.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	WA Public Health > WA 30 Socioeconomic factors in public health (General)
Faculty: Department:	Biological Sciences > Department of Tropical Disease Biology
Digital Object Identifer (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-023-11783-9
Depositing User:	Clare O'Neill
Date Deposited:	29 Sep 2023 09:34
Last Modified:	22 Apr 2024 11:56
URI:	https://archive.lstmed.ac.uk/id/eprint/23023

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