BETSAKA/conservation-dynamic-madagascar

Building a dynamic dataset to capture the historical evolution of protected areas in Madagascar (2000-2024), enabling more accurate conservation studies by including all successive states and their validity periods. # Conservation Dynamic Madagascar *Version française ci-dessous / French version below* ## Overview This repository documents the transparent and reproducible methodology used to produce a **dynamic temporal dataset** of Madagascar's protected areas covering the period 2000-2024. Unlike conventional static datasets that capture only current boundaries, this work reconstructs the complete legal and spatial history of each protected area, including boundary modifications, status changes, internal zoning, and temporary protections. The dataset itself is not directly hosted here but can be fully reproduced by following the documented procedures. The repository provides all code, documentation, and validation tools necessary to reconstruct the data from publicly available sources. ## Objectives - **Produce a temporal extension of WDPA**: Create time-explicit protected area data that preserves historical configurations, enabling robust longitudinal and impact analyses - **Document legal and spatial amendments**: Systematically identify and record changes to protected areas using legal texts (CNLEGIS), historical spatial datasets (SAPM versions), and expert literature - **Ensure transparency and reproducibility**: Provide open, auditable consolidation rules (CAR) that transform baseline WDPA data and documented amendments into temporal states - **Promote open science**: Enable the conservation research community to verify, critique, and build upon this methodology ## Key Features ### Data Sources Integration - **SAPM**: National protected area system datasets (2002-2024) - **WDPA**: World Database on Protected Areas historical archive (2010-2024) - **CNLEGIS**: Madagascar's legislative database with legal texts governing protected areas - **Expert literature**: Primarily Goodman et al. (2018) for validation ### Methodological Innovations - **YAML-based amendment registry**: Human-readable, version-controlled documentation of all corrections and historical informat …