Class and landscape level habitat fragmentation analysis in the Bale mountains national park, southeastern Ethiopia

Annissa Muhammed; Eyasu Elias

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07642

Class and landscape level habitat fragmentation analysis in the Bale mountains national park, southeastern Ethiopia

Heliyon. 2021 Jul 21;7(7):e07642. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07642. eCollection 2021 Jul.

Authors

Annissa Muhammed^{1

2}, Eyasu Elias¹

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Environmental Science, College of Natural and Computational Science, Addis Ababa University, P.O.Box: 1176, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
² Department of Natural Resource Management, College of Agriculture and Environmental Science, Arsi University, P.O.Box: 193, Assela, Ethiopia.

Abstract

The changes of natural habitat structure and function due to human interference is hastening worldwide, and it is compulsory to preserve biological resources in a protected system. This study aims to measure the landscape ecological structure and the extent of habitat fragmentation in the Bale mountains national park. The land use/land cover change was determined by interpreting the 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2017 Landsat images with ArcGIS 10.3, and the selected landscape structural metrics was analyzed using FRAGSTATS 4.2.1. All land cover classes showed a declining trend, except the farmland, and grassland depicted the highest area reduction. From 1985 to 2017 grassland, Erica, forestland, and afro-alpine were decreased by 9.36 %, 0.26 %, 0.06 %, and 0.01 %, respectively. Whereas, farmland was increased by 43.67 %. The study area was characterized as progressively fragmented since it was signified by the escalated value of patch number (40.22 %), area-weighted mean shape index (18.84 %), and edge density (22.27 %) and a declined value of mean patch size (28.68 %) and core area (10.60 %) over the study period. Considering this result, there was a high loss in area available for core dependent species, particularly for Mountain nyala in the grasslands and woodlands, Ethiopian wolf in afro-alpine regions, and Bale monkey in the bamboo forest. Both forestland and grassland need a conservation priority since these habitats were the most fragmented and habitat lost area.

Keywords: Ecological restoration; Habitat fragmentation; Landscape pattern.