Discussion

  There is little scientific research done on Zanzibar’s vegetation.  A majority of the information on Zanzibar deals with tourism or endangered animals on the island.  The information that I was able to find on the vegetation in Zanzibar was culled from books or articles that focused mainly on tourism. 

   While looking for satellite images of the island, it was very difficult to find a clear image.  A lot of the images had cloud cover, which made it difficult to do an analysis of the island.  The images with the smallest amount of cloud cover were used, but even those images were hard to fully analyze.  Since there is little scientific information available on the island, there were few detailed maps of the island that could be used as comparisons to the images I used. 

  With that said, further research on vegetation should be done on the island.  Zanzibar is an agriculturally based country with a majority of the agriculture taking place in the fertile region.  This is adding to the deforestation.  Since tourism is a growing industry in Zanzibar, there is further development on the island to accommodate the tourists. This has lead to landscape reconstruction, such as new beach resorts, to attract tourists to a “paradise” location.  If deforestation continues the fertile land may be destroyed.  When further research is conducted than field study is necessary.  Since the satellite images are unclear, field study should be conducted to measure the vegetation in Zanzibar.  It would be ideal, if a 10-year field research study were conducted measuring the forest and vegetation boundaries along with the growth of agriculture and urbanization.  I would also use aerial photography to capture the vegetation and urbanization areas of Zanzibar.  If aerial photographs were taken over a period of time than the images can be compared and the vegetation and urbanization boundaries can be analyzed.  Aerial photography along with field research will provide more solid information on Zanzibar's vegetation.