The relationship between land tenure security, community agricultural characteristics, and land-cover change in protected area buffer zones in Madagascar

Keywords: Land tenure, remote sensing, property rights, protected areas, shifting cultivation
Abstract Type: Poster Abstract

Abstract

Tenure and property rights define the relationship that people have with land and natural resources. Customary tenure is predominant in Madagascar, where locally administered rule systems have the flexibility to adapt to change and inherent conflict resolution mechanisms. However, laws at different levels of government have made overlap by different tenure systems common, causing conflict and tenure insecurity. One important alteration to existing tenure is the creation of protected areas, commonly employed to preserve the biodiversity of the island. Many investigations attempt to link land tenure to land-cover change using satellite imagery, but this study is the first to do so in Madagascar. In this study, I address the following problems: whether land-cover classification relying on ground truth data derived from aerial photography and high-resolution imagery can accurately portray landscapes in a humid tropical region, how a community’s tenure security influences land-cover change, and how land tenure on the periphery of a protected area interacts with the natural resources in the area. My classifications achieved high accuracies despite low image availability, showing that protected areas seemed relatively unaffected by surrounding land tenure systems and are effective at conserving natural resources. Within each surveyed community, conflict and insecurity were associated with elevated forest conversion, while there was consistently high change between open land-covers, regardless of tenure type. My results highlight the need to prioritize tenure security to meet the goals of the international conservation community, potentially through support for customary tenure systems and promotion of a socially responsible agricultural transition.