2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church have a centuries-old tradition of conserving patches of native Afromontane forest vegetation around Orthodox church buildings; today these “church forests” represent some of the only remaining natural vegetation across the heavily degraded northern Ethiopian landscape. The increasing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery allows for cataloguing and monitoring the number and extent of church forests in Ethiopia, as well as church forest attributes including vegetation density and edge-area ratio – which relate to biodiversity and other ecosystem services – both across space and over time.

This paper describes a new dataset representing the first large-scale effort to document the locations and extent of church forests across Ethiopia’s northern highlands. This dataset contains the geospatial coordinates and boundary tracings for over 12,000 church forests across the 159,174 square kilometer Amhara Peoples National Regional State. Dataset applications include training automated land use classification algorithms for indigenous forest detection, estimating changes over time in natural forest cover, and analyses of the socioeconomic correlates of church forest extent, density, and change. 

Our data on church forests allow for a greater appreciation of ecological complexity in northern Ethiopia. Current estimates of "forest" cover often combine indigenous species and non-native plantation species, but indigenous forests provide different ecosystem services than plantation forests, thus there is value in distinguishing forest types. The presence of church forests in northern Ethiopia at almost every latitude and longitude furthermore provides a unique opportunity to study native forests across multiple abiotic, biotic, and human management gradients. Combining these data with emerging sociodemographic data could allow for further understanding of the ecological and political / economic factors associated with forest degradation or regrowth across Ethiopia and beyond.

This dataset is a product of an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site in Ethiopia, bringing together U.S. undergraduate student researchers and Ethiopian faculty and student collaborators to study church forest ecosystem services (http://www.colby.edu/reu-in-ethiopia/). Our original church forest dataset will be made publicly available for other researchers.