National parks in the third world and associated national characteristics

Abstract

For 102 third world countries, presence and absence of national parks is used as the dependent or classification variable in a discriminant analysis. Eleven variables suggestive of diverse tropical savanna habitats contribute to a single canonical discriminant function. Socioeconomic variables are poor contributors to the function. Seventy‐nine of the countries are properly classified in their group by the canonical discriminant function. Misclassification focuses on sub‐Saharan Africa where many countries have established parks under “improper”; conditions, and strong positive association with the function calls attention to Latin America.