Figure 1.
National forest trends in East Africa.
Shown are overall forest trends independent of protection status (a) and forest trends depending on protection status (b). Note that only Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi are fully covered by the study area.
Table 1.
Number of parks per category and country.
Figure 2.
Forest trends within individual parks of four different protection categories between 2001 and 2009 as function of initial forest size in 2001 (log10-scale).
For graphical display of forest trends we excluded (very small) PAs that increased their forests by more than 300%. Thus, we excluded five Forest Reserves: Mukugodo FR in Kenya (3.9 km2, 822%; forest cover in 2001 and forest change), Ngaia FR in Kenya (0.2 km2, 900%), Geita FR in Tanzania (0.2 km2, 600%), Vumari FR in Tanzania (0.6 km2, 433%), Mwalugulu FR in Tanzania (0.4 km2, 450%). On this basis, we also excluded four National Parks: Rubondo NP in Tanzania (0.4 km2, 800%), Murchison Falls NP in Uganda (14.5 km2, 391%), Mago NP in Ethiopia (0.4 km2, 3550%) and Ruma NP in Kenya (1.1 km2, 440%).
Table 2.
Trends in forest cover across protection categories between 2001 and 2009.
Figure 3.
Satellite-derived estimates of forest trend within and around three PAs in East Africa.
Forest cover increased (green), decreased (red) or remained constant (orange). Some parks show significant loss in forest cover within their three buffer zones (0–1 km, 1 to 5 km, and 5–10 km). Other land cover transitions are white.
Table 3.
Percentage of forest change in buffer zones around PAs between 2001 and 2009.
Table 4.
Forest trends in buffer zones (B01, B15, and B510) around Effective National Parks (i.e. parks that increased or maintained their forest area between 2001 and 2009).
Figure 4.
Changes in human population densities with increasing distance from parks across the study area in East Africa.
Patterns of human population densities within buffer zones of protected areas differ between protection categories.
Table 5.
Significant drivers of forest trends (0: no forest loss, 1: forest loss) modelled using general linear models with logit link functions.