Bush encroachment dynamics and rangeland management implications in southern Ethiopia.

ABSTRACT: Rangelands in southern Ethiopia have been undergoing a rapid regime shift from herbaceous to woody plant dominance in the past decades, reducing indigenous plant biodiversity, altering ecosystem function, and threatening subsistence pastoralism. Despite significant rangeland management implications, quantification of spatial encroachment extent and transitional pathways that result in encroachment remain largely under-explored. This paper develops a phenology-based approach to map rangeland vegetation states in southern Ethiopia, and examines transition pathways among states using the state-and-transition model. The results indicate that nearly 80% of landscape was dominated by woody plants in 2013. While stable encroached states have been established in both high and low lands through dif

SUBMITTER: Liao C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6303711 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature