Valuing The Arc Linking Science With Stakeholders To Sustain Natural Capital

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The Eastern Arc Mountains


Fundamental to Valuing the Arc’s work in Tanzania has been the assembly – in a common GIS platform - of all relevant spatial data available for the region. The mapped dataset includes surfaces on land cover, land use change, climate, soils, population distribution and growth, poverty levels, human infrastructure and settlements and governance regimes. It is the most comprehensive GIS dataset in existence for eastern Tanzania, so we have made it as widely available as possible to colleagues in universities, government and NGOs.

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Caption: Valuing the Arc study areas in eastern Tanzania; the boundaries of the mountains follow a new delineation of the ecoregion developed as part of the programme (Platts et al. 2011). Highlands adjacent to the Eastern Arc have different geological substrates and have climatic regimes influenced more by the Great African Lakes or the intertropical convergence (a band of thunderstorms that circle the globe near the equator) than by the Indian Ocean.

Main Papers:

Hall, J., Burgess, N.D., Lovett, J., Mbilinyi, B., and R.E. Gereau (2009) Conservation implications of deforestation across an elevational gradient in the Eastern Arc Mountains, Tanzania. Biological Conservation, 142: 2510-252134

Platts PJ, Burgess ND, Gereau RE, Lovett JC, Marshall AR, McClean CJ, Pellikka PKE, Swetnam RD, Marchant R (2011) Delimiting tropical mountain ecoregions for conservation. Environmental Conservation 38, 312-324

Swetnam, RD & Reyers, B (2011) Meeting the challenge of conserving Africa's biodiversity: the role of GIS, now and in the future Landscape and Urban Planning, 100:411-414.

Pfeifer M, Burgess ND, Swetnam RD, Platts PJ, Willcock S, and Marchant R. (2012) Protected Areas: Mixed Success in Conserving East Africa’s Evergreen Forests. PLoS ONE 7: e39337.

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Updated 06/05/13