46 research outputs found
A Geospatial Approach to Sustainable Urban Planning: Lessons for Morogoro Municipal Council, Tanzania
No full textSustainable urban planning is essential in mediating the natural and built environments globally, yet, there is little progress as regards its attainment in developing countries. Rapid and unplanned urbanization continue to threaten the sustainability of many cities in Africa. By selecting Morogoro Municipal Council (MMC) in Tanzania as an example, this study applied well-known remote sensing techniques to understand the dynamics of urban growth and the implications for sustainable urban planning. The study analyzes spatio-temporal characteristics for eighteen years (2000–2018) based on urban land density using gradient and grid-based analysis to further examine land use and urban land density nexus. The results indicate declining urban land densities with distance to the city center, indicating a less compact and fragmented development at the urban fringes; and northward development with limited development to the south of MCC. The knowledge and understanding of the patterns of spatio-temporal conditions, land use planning, and management interventions in MMC are necessary for addressing the inadequacies associated with rapid urbanization within the study area. On this basis, we propose a shift from the modernist to the communicative planning strategy that strongly integrates the urban social, economic, and environmental imperatives, while being adaptable to evolving realities. This plan should also aim to curtail urban sprawl and create a viable city system and economically prosperous city structure for MMC
The role of women in poverty alleviation : a case study of Tarakea Women Sawmill in Rombo District, Tanzania
No full textThe core problem among the community household members particularly women in Rombo District towards development has been increasing income poverty. Rombo district is relatively poor with an average per capita income of Shs 96,000 per year when compared with National statistics of about 270,000 per capita (2002). There is a critical land shortage, which according to Rombo District council (2002), on average the area owned by household vary between 0.25 to 1 acres per household. Land is not fertile with very low production per unit area, poor land management husbandry and has been cultivated for many years. About 90 % of the rural population is engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry, which is mainly done by women. The main crops cultivated are maize, banana, beans, few fruit trees (mango, avocado and coffee), which is for cash.The area face a serious problem of poverty among women and this led to establishment of the Tarakea Women Sawmill (TAWOSA) with aim to improve their livelihood through an income generating activity. TAWOSA is a registered cooperative society that was established in 1987 with 150 founder women members from Tarakea Division in Rombo District. The project is located in Tarakea division, Rombo District, Kilimanjaro Region. The main activities of Tarakea Women Sawmill are sawmilling activities, which include, timber harvesting (logging), hauling (transportation), sawing and marketing of timber. (Author abstract)Sumari, S. V. (2007). The role of women in poverty alleviation: a case study of Tarakea Women Sawmill in Rombo District, Tanzania. Retrieved from http://academicarchive.snhu.eduMaster of Science (M.S.)School of Community Economic Developmen
Fuzzy AutoEncode Based Cloud Detection for Remote Sensing Imagery
No full textCloud detection of remote sensing imagery is quite challenging due to the influence of complicated underlying surfaces and the variety of cloud types. Currently, most of the methods mainly rely on prior knowledge to extract features artificially for cloud detection. However, these features may not be able to accurately represent the cloud characteristics under complex environment. In this paper, we adopt an innovative model named Fuzzy Autoencode Model (FAEM) to integrate the feature learning ability of stacked autoencode networks and the detection ability of fuzzy function for highly accurate cloud detection on remote sensing imagery. Our proposed method begins by selecting and fusing spectral, texture, and structure information. Thereafter, the proposed technique established a FAEM to learn the deep discriminative features from a great deal of selected information. Finally, the learned features are mapped to the corresponding cloud density map with a fuzzy function. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, 172 Landsat ETM+ images and 25 GF-1 images with different spatial resolutions are used in this paper. For the convenience of accuracy assessment, ground truth data are manually outlined. Results show that the average RER (ratio of right rate and error rate) on Landsat images is greater than 29, while the average RER of Support Vector Machine (SVM) is 21.8 and Random Forest (RF) is 23. The results on GF-1 images exhibit similar performance as Landsat images with the average RER of 25.9, which is much higher than the results of SVM and RF. Compared to traditional methods, our technique has attained higher average cloud detection accuracy for either different spatial resolutions or various land surfaces
Challenges and Opportunities for the Advancement of GIS Education in TANZANIA
No full textRapid developments in science and technology have driven utilization of Geographical Information Science (GIS) in various fields of Planning, Management, and exploitation of environmental resources and provision of social services. As information technology gains momentum, GIS uses information science infrastructure to address the problems of geography, cartography, geosciences locations and related branches of science and engineering; that is shortly referred to as Geo-informatics. Increased application of GIS calls for more demand of advanced Geo-informatics education worldwide. This study has established major challenges for the advancement of Geo-informatics education in Tanzania and any possible opportunities which can be utilized for the improvement of the same. Prominent challenges identified could be associated with lack of reliable power, internet connection, computer system and accessories and appropriate software. Other challenges were related to the nature of the school curriculum and insufficient knowledge and skills of the human resources. Opportunities identified involve available government plans for increasing power supply, increasing mobile phones networks, Tanzania ICT and education and training policy with a major aim of improving ICT education and the competency based school curriculum under implementation. But the government should further support directly or indirectly all efforts by various groups that participate in advancing Geo-informatics education in the country. Keywords: Education, Geo-informatics, Tanzania, GIS, Transfer of Technology IC
On the development of climate data visualization tool for interpretation of empirical results from climate model : does it add value to different stakeholders?
No full textTools for visualization of climate data have been developed specifically for scientists and professionals in climatology but more recently, there is need for interpretation of results from simulated and modeled climate data useful for different stakeholders. Various experts (climate scientist, water resources engineer, agricultural engineer, hydrologist, gender specialist, economics experts and computer scientist) worked together in understanding and solving problems pertaining to climate, crop, and economic modeling. In this paper, we present a climate data visualization tool developed to allow interactive display of maps as per multi-dimensional data sets from multiple parameters of climate data as per needs of different stakeholders
On the Development of Climate Data Visualization tool for Interpretation of Empirical Results from Climate Model: Does it add Value to Different Stakeholders?
No full textIn time of climate change there is a lot of interest in communicating detailed information and knowledge pertaining to climate to different stakeholders. In order to aid informed decision making related to changing climate and weather variability there is need for data visualization
tool. Data visualization tool plays a great role in interpreting bulk climate information produced or collected from different districts, regions and nations at large. In Tanzania, online real-time data visualization tool can help to bridge the gap in the current system whereby climate information is disseminated using television, radio as well as face-to face. These methods have many problems, one being difficulty for end user to aggregate the disseminated climate information over long period of time. This paper seeks to present a work toward developing of a tool for such purpose. The work was done by Database for Crop Models Simulation team from Tanzania with consultation of team members from Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. It is anticipated that the tool will enhance efficiency and effectiveness in dissemination and communication of climate information and knowledge to all actors who need it. Furthermore, the results from this study will simulate the debate about climate data visualization in this era where the climate
change is a problem which needs to be mitigated using a state-of-art solution
Urban growth dynamics and expansion forms in 11 Tanzanian cities from 1990 to 2020
No full textJournal ArticleWith rapid urban expansion across Tanzania, there is a need to institute
steps to address factors and forms as well as impacts and challenges
associated with the observed trend. This study’s aim is to use spatial
urban landscape indices to analyze the spatial changes in urban forms,
patterns, and rates across 11 urban centers in Tanzania over a 30-year
study period (1990–2020). During the past three decades, urban lands
of 11 cities and town in Tanzania have grown by a total of 480 km 2 .
Leapfrog growth was found as the most dominant form of urban
expansion in Tanzania while Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania, had
the highest rate of urban expansion when compared to all other
individual cities. The most robust and significant interaction of the
AWMLEI and MLEI was found in Kigoma, Arusha, Mtwara, Mafinga, and
Tunduma cities. In contrast, Mbeya agricultural city, Arusha the tourist
city, Tabora, and Geita Lake zone areas did show their own peculiarities
revealing an interesting spatial temporal variation in rate and form of
expansion. The outcome of this study reveals that the influence and
management of economic and socio-cultural opportunities will be an
effective tool for the determination of the rapidly expanding cities and
towns of Tanzania
On the absurdity of rapid urbanization: Spatio-temporal analysis of land-use changes in Morogoro, Tanzania
No full textThis study questions the frequent overemphasis on population growth aspects of African urbanization with little consideration of the spatial extent by analyzing the influence of population growth on the spatial expansion of the Morogoro urban municipality (MUM) in Tanzania between 2000 and 2016. Shannon's Entropy, a random forest supervised classifier, and spatial analysis were adopted to analyze Multi-temporal Landsat images obtained through the Google Earth Engine platform to quantify the spatial and temporal distribution and pattern of land-use change. Findings from this research show that Shannon's entropy values for MUM increased from 0.522 in 2000, to 0.761 in 2007, and to 0.901 in 2016 with the urban land cover recording a considerable and consistent increase. Similarly, the municipality's annual rate of change in population decreased from 4.17% in 1967 to 3.81% in 2016, and is estimated to rise to 4.54% by 2030 with a corresponding population of 25,262 in 1967 and 622,000 in 2016. From the results, the rate of population growth is not commensurate with the rate of spatial expansion, as the spatial extent is more than twice the population growth. An important contribution from this research relates to the limited attention to the faster rate of urban expansion compared to population
growth in African cities; a situation that is inconsistent with sustainable and resilient urban futures. It is recommended
that municipal authorities should consider initiatives (e.g., environmental planning models) to
reverse the current trend of urban growth in order to improve the health, density, sustainability and resilience of
the urban environment
Urban growth dynamics and expansion forms in 11 Tanzanian cities from 1990 to 2020
No full textWith rapid urban expansion across Tanzania, there is a need to institute steps to address factors and forms as well as impacts and challenges associated with the observed trend. This study’s aim is to use spatial urban landscape indices to analyze the spatial changes in urban forms, patterns, and rates across 11 urban centers in Tanzania over a 30-year study period (1990–2020). During the past three decades, urban lands of 11 cities and town in Tanzania have grown by a total of 480 km2. Leapfrog growth was found as the most dominant form of urban expansion in Tanzania while Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania, had the highest rate of urban expansion when compared to all other individual cities. The most robust and significant interaction of the AWMLEI and MLEI was found in Kigoma, Arusha, Mtwara, Mafinga, and Tunduma cities. In contrast, Mbeya agricultural city, Arusha the tourist city, Tabora, and Geita Lake zone areas did show their own peculiarities revealing an interesting spatial temporal variation in rate and form of expansion. The outcome of this study reveals that the influence and management of economic and socio-cultural opportunities will be an effective tool for the determination of the rapidly expanding cities and towns of Tanzania
Pattern analysis of substandard and inadequate distribution of educational resources in urban–rural areas of Abbottabad, Pakistan
No full textDespite an extensive system of public schools, Abbottabad, Pakistan has a chronically low literacy rate. A factor contributing to these low literacy rates might be a spatial mismatch between public schools and dense settlements in fast-growing urban
and semi-urban areas of this municipal region. To test this proposition, the locations of 153 public schools were collected using hand-held GPS devices to create a geo-database, and a road network was created from the open street map and Google imagery. Nearest neighbor, K-function, Spearman’s Rho, and directional analyses were applied to this data to overcome the limitations of sparse geospatial data. A point pattern analysis shows that more than 50% of secondary schools were clustered south of the city while most of the built-up area was in the north. Localizing Geospatial data, spatial restructuring, and reorganization of schools in the study area would support rational
planning and enhance student access to school facilities
