SUSTAINABLE NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT Edited by Abiud Kaswamila Sustainable Natural Resources Management Edited by Abiud Kaswamila Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2011 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. 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Used under license from Shutterstock.com First published December, 2011 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechweb.org Sustainable Natural Resources Management, Edited by Abiud Kaswamila p. cm. ISBN: 978-953-307-670-6 free online editions of InTech Books and Journals can be found at www.intechopen.com Contents Preface IX Part 1 Application of Models, Remote Sensing and GIS in Natural Resource Management 1 Chapter 1 Fuzzy Image Processing, Analysis and Visualization Methods for Hydro-Dams and Hydro-Sites Surveillance and Monitoring 3 Gordan Mihaela, Dancea Ovidiu, Cislariu Mihaela, Stoian Ioan and Vlaicu Aurel Chapter 2 Upstream Landscape Dynamics of US National Parks with Implications for Water Quality and Watershed Management 27 William B. Monahan and John E. Gross Chapter 3 Sustainable Management of Large Scale Irrigation Systems: A Decision Support Model for Gediz Basin, Turkey 51 Murat Kilic and Suer Anac Part 2 Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation 83 Chapter 4 Sustainable Use of Natural Resources of Dryland Regions in Controlling of Environmental Degradation and Desertification 85 Peter F. Ffolliott Part 3 Natural Resources Management and Poverty Alleviation 103 Chapter 5 Sustainable Natural Resource Management, a Global Challenge of This Century 105 Esmail Karamidehkordi VI Contents Chapter 6 Roles of Diverse Stakeholders in Natural Resources Management and Their Relationships with Regional Bodies in New South Wales, Australia 115 Brent C. Jacobs and Peter R. Brown Chapter 7 An Analysis of the Contribution of Community Wildlife Management Areas on Livelihood in Tanzania 139 Abiud Kaswamila Chapter 8 Assessment of Livestock Loss Factors in the Western Serengeti, Tanzania 155 J. W. Nyahongo and E. Røskaft Preface Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest Neolithic resource users made their decisions on resource use by selecting the best areas for different uses. Resource management strategies have been influenced to varying extents by the nature of the land ever since (Mango, 1996). Conscious land use planning, now worldwide considered to be a panacea of resource use conflicts and a way of increasing productivity, originated during the Greek empire when philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle encouraged reasoning, logic, invention and scientific ways of solving problems. On the other hand, past and present efforts on land resources management seem to be inadequate as land degradation, climate change, and demographic pressure continue unabated and land productivity continues to decline at an alarming rate, which is symptomatic of our failure to mitigate the problems. We now channel more than 40% of terrestrial net primary productivity, which is sustenance of all animals and decomposers, to our own needs (Vitousek et al., 1986). Forty-five percent is under cropland and permanent pasture, 36% of Africa, 30% of North America, 35% of South America, 47% of Europe, 25% of former Soviet Union (Woodroffe et al., 2005). The current rate of land resources degradation worldwide is sending a shockwave through mankind. Statistics show that soil erosion and other factors are leading to an irreversible loss of land productivity on more than six million hectares of fertile land a year - about 24% of the inhabited land (Lal, 1993). The values of individual continents range from 12% in North America, 19% in Ocenia, 26% in Europe, 27% in Africa and 31% in Asia (Lal, 1993). Regardless of the methods used for the assessment, it is clear that it is a worldwide problem requiring attention. For example, the Sub-Saharan Africa imports about 10 million tons (60% of demand) of rice annually at a cost of around US $ 6 billion, which is the largest continent’s import bill after petroleum (Ngailo & Kaswamila, 2011). In other words, the need for natural resources conservation is as great today as it ever was. Entering the 22 nd Century, the challenges to scientists, conservationists, politicians, planners, and decision-makers are to make the world a safe place to live in, today and tomorrow, for the benefit of the present and future generations. Our children and grandchildren should not ask us: why didn’t you take action to safeguard our planet? X Preface This book is about finding the best way to manage challenges emanating from accelerating natural resource use. The contributors in this book have vast expertise and experience in natural resources management. All the chapters suggest that sustainable natural resources management can only be achieved through use of system thinking to help us think and learn collectively how to manage complexities and challenges. It provides an integrated approach which finally creates an enabling environment for stakeholders to adopt and benefit from; and adoption of resilience thinking as a paradigm for systematic natural resource management planning process that offers hope of transformational change in the management of socio-ecological systems. It is also evident that technology use such as GIS and remote sensing and modelling have great roles in natural resources management. Abiud Kaswamila Department of Geography and Environmental Studies The University of Dodoma, Dodoma Tanzania [...]... category of natural resources This implies the definition of the appropriate set of relevant indexes for the natural resources, influenced by the water management policy As shown in the literature, five indexes are most relevant for the natural resources category in the framework of water resource management: the total water resources; the water resources per capita; the utilization rate of the water resources; ... Huang, 2007) These five indexes are grouped into the index layer of the component Based on their current values and on the management evaluation procedure, the 20 Sustainable Natural Resources Management quality of the water resource management policy in respect to the natural resources preservation is expressed in terms of five fuzzy qualifiers: Worst, Bad, Moderate, Good and Best, grouped in the... values: close to best management and between bad and moderate, but not worst management, as shown in Figure 12 The results are compliant to the observer’s expectations Fig 10 Illustration of the Somes River Basin marked map, to be further processed in visualization purposes 22 Sustainable Natural Resources Management Fig 11 Illustration of an inpainting result for the forest region with a natural texture,... administrative or political boundaries (European Parliament, 2000) This assumes a thorough analysis of the 4 Sustainable Natural Resources Management associated complex and heterogeneous data, to perform both the analysis of the current resource management policy and to predict the impact of some management policy on the environment, economy and society Such a complex task is best performed by a computer... compared to the examined surface, so the calcite class weight should be increased Intuitively, the more negative γ is, the larger the weight assigned to the calcite class should be 12 Sustainable Natural Resources Management Note that although there is no a-priori association of the class index j, j=1,2 or 3, and the brightness of the colors in the class, we always know that the fuzzy class with light... to take into account the spatial and temporal correlation of the two types of images of the same hydro-dam downstream surface This approach is presented in the following sub-section 14 Sustainable Natural Resources Management 3.2 Bimodal infiltration assessment through the integration of infrared and visible information The block diagram of the bimodal fusion based approach for water infiltration assessment... temperature on the plot’s thermal map However we can expect that in such areas little evidence of calcite will be identified in the visible image, since the calcite is likely to occur in 16 Sustainable Natural Resources Management the region below the wet areas This gives reason to believe that the two information sources can favourably complement each other Since in the case of the thermal maps we always... infiltration In order to test this method we used the same multi-modal database containing images acquired from Tarnita dam, near Cluj-Napoca We selected 5 pairs of plots acquired in both 18 Sustainable Natural Resources Management modalities (visible and infrared) As shown earlier in this section, a ground truth for visible image segmentation into calcite areas and non-calcite areas can be easily obtained,... Table 1 Quantitative results of our algorithm against subjective human expert’s opinion 4 Assessment of the water resources management policy in a hydro-site region As the hydro-dams reservoirs are also the main water supply resources for the geographical region, the assessment of the water management policy in the operation of the hydro-dam in respect to various economical and environmental factors is... water resource management are called indexes Each index represents a relevant attribute in the water resource management evaluation, and it must allow either a numerical or a qualitative description During the system’s setup, a weight must be assigned to each index, showing its relevance in the assessment of the water resource management The weights may vary depending on the available water resources in . SUSTAINABLE NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT Edited by Abiud Kaswamila Sustainable Natural Resources Management Edited by Abiud Kaswamila. accelerating natural resource use. The contributors in this book have vast expertise and experience in natural resources management. All the chapters suggest that sustainable natural resources management. Chapter 5 Sustainable Natural Resource Management, a Global Challenge of This Century 105 Esmail Karamidehkordi VI Contents Chapter 6 Roles of Diverse Stakeholders in Natural Resources Management