Assessing changes in Tanzania's Kwakuchinja Wildlife Corridor using multitemporal satellite imagery and open source tools

Abstract The Kwakuchinja Wildlife Corridor (KWC) connects Tanzania's Tarangire and Lake Manyara national parks. The KWC has historically been an avenue for 25 species of wildlife, including African elephants (Loxodonta africana), to move between the two parks –movement which is essential to maintain herd size and animal well-being. Unfortunately, due to increasing human settlement and agriculture prevalent in the corridor, the health of the corridor was listed as ‘critical’ in 2009. The ability to map, monitor, and model landuse dynamics is essential to conservationists seeking to preserve free animal movement through the KWC. We show that land cover change in the corridor can be mapped using open-source satellite image products and applications. We demonstrate this process by comparing landcover maps derived from Landsat data in 2002 and 2017. The imagery was acquired and processed in the open-source Google Earth Engine and QGIS software. Results show that agriculture increased by 35.6% and woodlands decreased by 67.4% in the KWC study area in the period between 2002 and 2017. While some of the farmland increase was simple expansion of pre-existing fields, most of the increase occurred along the newly paved (in 2005) road A104.