Africa's protected areas are brightening at night: A long-term light pollution monitor based on nighttime light imagery

As the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation, the core value of protected areas (PAs) is to maintain an area’s natural conditions (both day and night) and to restrict human-caused disturbances to biology and the environment. Although the value of PAs has been universally recognized, light pollution within them is worsening as a result of the widespread use of artificial illumination devices. Previous studies have focused on light pollution in PAs and evaluated light radiation using nighttime light imagery. However, given the scale and span of these studies (national scale and over short periods), PA light pollution research should be advanced further. In this paper, we conducted long-term (1992–2018) monitoring and evaluation of light pollution in African PAs using aligned multi-sensor NTL data. The results showed that 1) Africa PAs were impacted by increasingly severe artificial lights during 1992–2018, with all three light indices showing an accelerating increasing trend. 2) The number of light-polluted PAs also rapidly increased, with more than 80% of PAs experiencing aggravated light pollution as of 2018. Different types of PAs had heterogeneous light pollution, which penetrates indiscriminately into all PA regulation levels. 4) Light pollution in African PAs was divided into three types, including outside invasion, internal sources, and mixed pollution. 5) Human activity intensity surrounding the PAs was highly correlated with light pollution within them, with a maximum effect distance of approximately 245 km. This paper provides new approaches for understanding the patterns of light pollution within PAs, and is a valuable reference for future PA planning.