Effects of mono-cropping on land-cover transitions in the wet evergreen agro ecological zone of Ghana

There is notable vegetation changes taking place in the Wet evergreen forest zone of Ghana even though it appears “evergreen” in most map depictions. It has been observed that natural vegetation habitats have gradually been replaced by several hectares of plantation agriculture such as rubber, oil palm, and coconut over the years, and this threatens indigenous biodiversity. Currently, there are no records on the rates of habitats loss. This research applied remote sensing to assess the landcover changes taking place in the Ankobra River landscape which covered four districts of the western region ofGhana. Using landsat historical images, landcover maps were produced for 199 1 and 2018, and the two maps were subsequently compared through a lancover change detection approach using Erdas software. Closed and opened forest dominated the 1991 landcover map, and tree crop plantation and farmland/grassland were of the same coverage. Tree crop plantation covers about 51%, more than opened and closed forests put together, in the 2018 classified map. The closed and opened forest were mainly converted to tree crop plantations.