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.
