Farmers Establishment Impact on the Forest Dynamic of Monogaga Protected Forest, in the Southwest of Côte d’Ivoire: Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Approach

Abstract

The deforestation is a major problem in Côte d’Ivoire. Monogaga protected forest is strongly cleared for agriculture. Thus, the research aims to determine the influence of the farmer’s occupancies on the forest dynamic. The supervised classification by Neural net has been applied with success to Landsat imagery of 1986 and 2017. It has been preceded by the vegetation physiognomic characterization. The vegetation units are the closed forest, the degraded forest and the fallow-crops. The neural Net classification has been used to discriminate the closed forest area. To the dynamic level, the loss of closed forest proportion between 1986 and 2017 is 86.52%. The annual deforestation rate in regular (linear) and irregular (exponential) level is respectively 2.88% and 6.46% on 30 years. The anthropogenic units descended of the degradation represent some more 90 % of land cover, with a contribution of the crops at more than 40%. These same units are also implied in regeneration to a proportion of some more 90%, always with the crops proportion of 60%. Several mutations are in use. It’s the degradation, conservation and regeneration, with a predominance of degradation. The result shows the bad conservation. This survey showed that the protected forest is submitted to agricultural pressure and all other anthropogenic activities. It is important to have a forest conservation politics and more efficient management.