Land Cover Fragmentation Using Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing on Major Mine Sites in Southern Katanga (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Laëtitia Dupin, Collin Nkono, Christian Burlet, François Muhashi, Yves Vanbrabant

Royal Institute of Natural Sciences, Bruxelles, Belgium.

DOI: 10.4236/ars.2013.22017                

Abstract

The study areas are located in the Katanga province to the South Eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It focuses on the Kolwezi and Tenke-Fungurume mining centers, located in the vicinity of the Basse-Kando reserve. The 3 study areas have faced large scale human induced the fragmentation of land cover. A combination of ancillary data and satellite imageries was interpreted to construct fragmentation dynamics over the last 30 years. This study is an initial step towards assessing the impact of fragmentation on sustainable land cover in the Katanga. The results bring out that large trends of fragmentation differently occurred over the last 30 years (1979 to 2011) in the three focused areas. The most dominant fragmentation processes were gains in barren soil and cities surface and a sharp reduction in burned areas. In Kolwezi, a close relationship is observed between growth and regression of barren soil and cities over vegetation. The Tenke-Fungurume site shows a growth during the 1980-1990 time slice and regression of vegetation during the following two decades. The Basse-Kando site analyze brings out growth of vegetation and regression of burned area due to vegetation conservation efforts. This is one of the studies in Katanga around mines activities that combine multi-source and spatio-temporal data on land cover to enable long-term quantification of land cover fragmentation.

Keywords

Land Cover; Fragmentation; Katanga; Remote Sensing

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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