Landscape Changes in Savanna Systems: Understanding the Roles of Climate, Vegetation Dynamics, Parks and Protected Areas, Resources, People and Livelihoods

Dear Colleagues,

The Kavango-Kwandu-Zambezi catchments that comprise our study area support an unmatched diversity of large mammal species and represent major investments in protected areas in the form of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area’s component parks and community conservation areas. Savanna vegetation ecosystem processes, and their phenological expression, are heavily influenced by climate variability. The IPCC (2007) predicts that southern Africa will experience an increase in climate variability and a decrease in precipitation. The research presented in this issue represents interactions of the human-environment system and also looks across spatial scales. At a regional scale the ecosystems have different resilience characteristics, and different response pathways to climatic perturbations, and at that time-scale analyses provide a significant improvement in methods for measuring and evaluating landscape resilience. Changes in climate are clearly driving change in some landscapes, if not in others, at scales that human managers cannot perceive easily. At more local scales, however, land use and management decisions are also relevant, and, perhaps of even greater importance, are the changes in variability. We look at how different regions and land management/livelihood strategies respond to past climate variability as well as issues related to other landscape drivers - herbivory, wildlife and parks. Overall this set of papers provides an in depth and interdisciplinary look at the land and landscapes of Southern Africa, experiencing significant climatic variability and various development strategies, as well as interesting linkages to wildlife and tourism, all across a four nation region (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Angola).

Dr. Jane Southworth
Guest Editor

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