Linking Conservation Outcomes to Governance Configurations Using Remote Sensing in Sub-Saharan African Protected Areas

Protected areas are central to biodiversity conservation, yet both their effectiveness and its assessment remain difficult where institutional capacity, monitoring systems, and data availability are limited, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. This project develops and evaluates an open-data, exposure to disturbance-controlled framework to test whether and how governance configurations, operationalized through spatial governance indicators, are associated with conservation outcomes measured from remotely sensed disturbance trajectories. Chapter 1 develops and applies the workflow within Upemba National Park (DR Congo) to assess whether variation in disturbance trajectories (2001-2024) aligns with governance indicators once exposure to disturbance is controlled for. Interpretability is assessed using non-public sources. Chapter 2 scales the workflow to multiple large Sub-Saharan African protected areas using only openly accessible datasets, identifying consistent, context-dependent, or non-interpretable governance–conservation outcome associations. Chapter 3 develops an agent-based model to explore how protected areas may evolve, estimating plausible long-term disturbance trajectories under alternative governance indicator scenarios, relevant for 30×30 planning. The project aims to provide (i) a transparent, reproducible methodology for outcome-based conservation diagnostics, and (ii) evidence on where and under which governance configurations conservation outcomes remain favorable once exposure is accounted for. More broadly, it evaluates whether conservation outcomes can be meaningfully inferred using only open data, supporting decision-making where field access is restricted, political dynamics are sensitive, or reporting systems are unreliable, precisely where conservation needs are highest and conventional metrics least feasible.