Effects of Monocropping on Land Cover Transitions in the Wet Evergreen Agro-Ecological Zone of Ghana

Abstract

The wet evergreen forest ecological zone of Ghana is undergoing notable structural changes, although most maps erroneously depict the area to be an intact forest. Several hectares of plantation agriculture such as rubber, oil palm, and cocoa are replacing the natural vegetation and habitats, thereby threatening indigenous biodiversity. This study aimed to assess the effects of tree monocrop proliferation on landscape transitions between 1986 and 2020 in the Wassa East District of Ghana. The ISODATA clustering technique was used to produce land cover category maps from Landsat images of 1986, 2002, and 2020. A post-classification change detection technique resulted in transition matrices which were used for the computation of land cover transition intensities over 34 years. The results showed that the landscape was dominated by forests in 1986. Still, the forest continuously declined by 34% (1% annually) in 2020 while all other land cover types increased in both periods with cocoa covering 23% oil palm covering 14%, and rubber covering 2% of the land area. These conversions in the land area are important, especially since the closed forests usually transition to monocrops through the intermediate process: food crop farming. This information is essential for decision making on land development and biodiversity conservation.