The use of remote sensing and GIS techniques to detect land use/cover transfers in the Ejisu Municipality of Ghana

Abstract

Available information on land use/cover transfer is at the global and national levels while change processes are widespread at the local level. Natural resources monitoring and assessment programmes in Ghana focus on maintenance of quality, quantity of merchantable species and diversity of forest resources. However, there is the need to detect land use/cover transfer information in Ghana at all levels of aggregation for proper management of forest resources. Thus this study sought to identify the prevalent land use/cover transfer and to link them to socio-economic factors driving them at the local level using remote sensing and GIS techniques in a forestry context of Ejisu municipality. To achieve this, post classification change detection was conducted between two years using Landsat TM 1986 and ETM 2010 to detect changes/transfers at the municipal level to produce a transfer matrix and transfer map of the two years. Fragment statistics including number of patches, largest patch index, patch density, mean patch size were computed. The analysis of the change revealed that forest area has decreased from 18628.588 ha in 1986 to 4784.484 ha in 2010 due to transfer to grass indirectly via agriculture. Forest fragmentation also decreased in 2010.