The Lake Ol’Bolossat wetland is one of the critical ecosystems that sustains the livelihood of the people living downstream of the Ewaso Nyiro river. Over the last 40 years the area around the wetland has seen rapid social and economic developments. These developments have brought with them serious alterations to the wetland causing its fragmentation and loss of its biodiversity. The study utilizes landscape metrics of largest patch index, patch cohesion index and the splitting index to analyze the changing fragmentation conditions of patch distribution, connectedness and patch separation from 2000 to 2020. The drivers of the changes in the wetland are investigated using Random Forest regression and the results used to simulate the landscape ecological conditions for the year 2030 using the CA markov method. The study finds that higher temperature, and population increased the fragmentation of the landscape while others such as gentle slopes, and short distance from roads generally reduced the fragmentation of human land uses but fragmented the ecological spaces. Climatic factors were determined to be of the higher importance in determining the fragmentation conditions. Then using an ecological risk model, the study identifies areas of high land use conflict in the landscape that would form the basis of areas that are most likely to succumb to the pressures of external land uses due to weakened land stability and thus become starting points for restoration of the wetland. It is determined that in the L. Ol’Bolossat area, the most vulnerable areas are to the north neighboring the towns Nyahururu and to the west and east of the wetland each adjacent to agricultural land.
Lake Ol’Bolossat wetland faces overwhelming threats due to ever-present land use changes in the area(KWS et al., 2020 & Zacharia et al., 2013). Predominant land uses in the landscape of the wetland include settlement and farming activities. The existence of urban land use and agriculture land use in the lake Ol’Bolossat landscape is a crucial issue to the sustainability of the wetland. It is therefore important to study the historical, current and future trends of the landscape conditions, the interactions among the landscape classes and effects on the wetland landscape usin Earth observation data.
The main aim of this research is to assess the Spatial-Temporal changes in the land scape of the lake Ol’Bolossat wetland for information that could be used for its management, conservation and rehabilitation.
- To investigate the land scape fragmentation conditions changes in the wetland ecosystem (2000 - 2020).
- To simulate the future (2030) fragmentation conditions of the Lake Ol’Bolossat wetland.
- To identify general landscape areas and wetland areas most vulnerable to loss to other land uses
