Contextualizing Landscape-Scale Forest Cover Loss in the DRC between 2000 and 2015

Shifting cultivation has been shown to be the primary cause of land use change in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Traditionally, forested and fallow land is rotated in a slash and burn cycle that over time has created a mosaic of agricultural inter-cropping and secondary forest known as the rural complex. The presented study investigates the land use contexts of new forest clearing (2000-2015) in primary forest outside of the established rural complex. These new forest clearings are geospatially separable, occurring as either 1) rural complex expansion (RCE), or 2) isolated forest perforations (IFP), with consequent implications on the forest ecosystem and biodiversity habitat. We estimated land cover composition within both the RCE and the IFP by photo-interpreting very high resolution imagery at sample points selected by simple random sampling. In addition, to assess whether particular land uses such as logging, mining, or plantations were associated with different land cover classes we quantified land use within concentric circular buffer areas surrounding each sample point. From 2000-2015, subsistence agriculture was the dominant driver of forest clearing for both extension of settled areas and pioneer clearings removed from settled areas. Less than 1% of clearing was attributable to land uses such as mining, plantations, and logging. The impact of commercial operations in the DRC is dwarfed by the reliance of rural populations on shifting cultivation. However, while smallholder farming remains the direct cause of the vast majority of forest cover loss in the DRC, large-scale agroindustry and resource extraction activities might lead to increased forest loss and degradation beyond their previously-understood footprints, as the worker populations associated with these activities create communities that rely on shifting cultivation and non-timber forest products (NTFP) for food, energy and building materials. At the landscape scale, an estimated 11.7% of forest loss within the RCE and 8.9% of the area of IFP was within 5km of mines, logging or plantations. Given increasing demographic and commercial pressures on DRC's forests, it will be crucial to factor in this land use change dynamic in land use planning and sustainability-focused governance; this methodology provides a monitoring tool to do so.