Household level influences on fragmentation in an African park landscape

The process of landscape fragmentation outside park borders occurs through the actions of people living near the boundaries. In the Kibale National Park landscape in western Uganda, human-landscape relationships are typified by small-scale subsistence agriculture, in which households rely on resources provided in forests and wetlands, whose use is in turn shaped by perceptions of resource availability. To understand and manage for fragmentation of resource pools, modeling and identifying the proximate drivers, and thus enacted resource extraction and utilization – is of fundamental importance. We combine landscape analysis at the household scale, using remotely sensed data, with household surveys, to understand the potential human drivers of local scale landscape change. We found strong evidence for a local household zone (LHZ) effect on fragmentation patterns with geographical and socioecological heterogeneities in LHZ impact. Differences were influenced by wealth, and in some cases, tribal identity. The perception of crop raiders – primarily baboons and small monkeys, but also elephants and other animals – may have largely shaped human-environment interactions, and were associated with fragmentation. Ninety-two percent of the best fit models included the attitude that the park should stay, but associated it with increased fragmentation, suggesting that the uncharacteristic non-hostile attitude about Kibale does not directly translate into conservation-friendly local human-environment interactions. This study provides insight into park–neighbor interactions and the influence of the LHZ on protected-area landscapes, and it points to important points in the system for collaborative opportunities to engage communities and conservation managers.