Abstract

Understanding how land-use change affects habitat fragmentation and connectivity is essential for assessing landscape degradation and conservation effectiveness in protected areas globally. It is particularly acute in tropical protected areas where anthropogenic pressures are intensifying. This study investigated long-term landscape dynamics, forest fragmentation, and structural connectivity in the Bena Mulumbu Hunting Domain, a Category VI protected area located in the Miombo woodland region of southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Landsat imagery acquired in 1995, 2005, 2015, and 2025 was classified using the Random Forest algorithm into six land-cover classes (Miombo woodland, savanna, agricultural land, mining areas, built-up/bare land, and water bodies) to quantify land-cover changes over 30 years. Landscape composition was assessed using the percentage of landscape (PLAND), Shannon diversity metrics, and transition analyses. At the same time, fragmentation and structural connectivity of Miombo woodland were evaluated along an edge-to-core gradient (0–2 km, 2–4 km, 4–6 km, and >6 km) using landscape metrics. Results showed that savanna remained the dominant land-cover type throughout the study period. However, the landscape underwent progressive reorganization characterized by recurrent transitions among Miombo woodland, savanna, and agricultural land, leading to increased spatial heterogeneity. Fragmentation analyses revealed significant spatial differences in total core area among zones (Kruskal–Wallis: H = 8.12, p = 0.044); however, after normalization by zone area, no consistent edge-to-core gradient was observed for core habitat proportion, indicating that raw differences primarily reflect zone size rather than a systematic ecological gradient. Despite increasing fragmentation, structural connectivity remained high across the hunting domain. The CONNECT index increased significantly from the edge toward the core zone (p = 0.003), highlighting better-connected forest networks in interior sectors. These findings suggest that the Bena Mulumbu Hunting Domain is experiencing an intermediate stage of landscape transformation, where forest fragmentation is evident but has not yet resulted in widespread connectivity loss. Maintaining existing forest cores and connectivity corridors should therefore be prioritized to prevent further degradation of ecological integrity. These findings challenge the assumption that landscape degradation in protected tropical Miombo woodlands necessarily follows a simple edge-to-core gradient.

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