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LOCATING THE FRONTIERS OF DEFORESTATION

the Eastern Highlands of Madagascar; Change in Soil Quality in Relation to Deforestation and Land Use Change.

by: Tor-Gunnar Vågen

In view of the manifold benefits that are attributable to forests, their progressive depletion must rank high in the global research and development agenda. Here, we present a summary of findings related to deforestation and soil degradation from the Kakamega Forest in Kenya and the Eastern Rainforests of Madagascar.
Basic data on land resources and soil quality in particular are scarce in Madagascar, particularly when considering the island’s diverse landforms and soils, and the vast extent of severe soil degradation. In addition, there are significant uncertainities in current estimates of deforestation and land use change on the island, mainly due to simplistic representations of deforestation and ecological change and a general lack of quantitative, spatially-explicit and statistically representative data on change in land cover and -use. There are often subtle differences between land cover modifications and conversions (deforestation) due to ecosystem resilience, inter-annual variability and complex land-cover change trajectories making land cover change estimates uncertain if for instance the spatial scale of the imagery used does not match that of the processes studied or an insufficient number of imagery is used (i.e. temporal scale is inappropriate). Several studies have also been based on extrapolations of earlier estimates without proper ground surveys, resulting in propagation of errors from study to study. The majority of available studies have attempted to assess change in natural forest cover, but very few studies have been conducted to assess other and more detailed types of land use change.

The findings presented here are brief exerts from a Ph.D. study conducted by the author on Change in Soil Quality in Relation to Deforestation in the Highlands of Madagascar at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (former Agricultural University of Norway) and Norwegian Centre for Soil and Environmental Research (Jordforsk) in collaboration with ICRAF.
 

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