Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics Analysis of the Togodo Protected Area and Its Surroundings in Southeastern Togo, West Africa

Abstract

<jats:p>Assessing land use and land cover (LULC) change is essential for the sustainable management of natural resources, biodiversity conservation, monitoring food security, and research related to climate change and ecology. With increasingly rapid changes in LULC in response to human population growth, a better assessment of land use changes is more necessary than ever. Although a multitude of LULC assessment methods exists, none alone provides a clear understanding of changes and their underlying factors. This study analysed historical LULC changes over a temporal extent of 42 years (1974–2016) in the Togodo Protected Area and its surroundings, in Togo, by associating intensity and trajectory analyses, that are complementary but rarely associated in the literature. Our results show that LULC change in our study site is linked to the combined effects of human activities, climate, and invasive plants, particularly Chromolaena odorata. While each type of analysis provides useful insights, neither intensity nor trajectory analysis alone provides a full picture of changes and their causes. This study highlights the usefulness of associating intensity and trajectory analyses when implementing any management policy.</jats:p>

Agricultural Land-Use Increases Floral Species Richness in Tropical Dry Forest and Savannah Ecosystems in West Africa

“…The annual thermal amplitude varies a little. The average annual rainfall at the Tabligbo station, the closest to the study area, calculated over a series of 49 years of observations [24] is about 1061 mm with a standard deviation of 142 mm [21]. Consistent with the framework of [25], the temporal scale of the changes and the size make the Togodo protected area and surroundings a suitable area to analyze the effect of land-use changes on vegetation changes.…”

“…As in other West African countries, semi-natural habitats in Togo are undergoing significant changes due to human activities such as agricultural expansion, illegal logging, and incursions into protected areas [18][19][20]. Over the last five decades, like in other West African countries, the Togodo Protected Area (TPA) in south-eastern Togo ˗ whose primary purpose is biodiversity conservation -and surrounding areas underwent notable land-use and land cover changes [21]. Croplands, fallows, and teak or oil palm plantations were established at the expense of dry forests and savannahs.…”

Holding out the promise of Lasswell's dream: Big data analytics in public policy research and teaching

“…In comparison with the themes above, the emphasis here is less on the techniques of analysis and more on the type of data used, such as satellite data, radar information, and LiDAR data. Conrad et al (2017), for example, use satellite data to spatially map crop diversity in Uzbekistan and Akodéwou et al (2020) analyze the intensity and trajectory of historical land use and land cover change in Togo. Some scholars also use spatial data to pursue more explanatory analysis, such as examining the effect of land use and urbanization on land surface temperature (Athukorala & Murayama, 2020; Ranagalage et al, 2019), estimating the impact of residential property (re‐)development on canopy cover change in New Zealand (Guo et al, 2019), investigating the relationship between climatic variables and landscape characteristics on deforestation in Peru (Bax & Francesconi, 2018).…”

Identifying Land Degradation and its Driving Factors in the Aral Sea Basin From 1982 to 2015

“…A transfer matrix is a beneficial tool to analyze LULC that can quantify the trajectory of each LULC type (Hernández et al, 2016;Sang et al, 2019;Akodéwou et al, 2020). For quantitative analysis of change in different land-use classes, total area change (A; Eq(2)) and the rate of change (p; Eq(3)) are used by pervious studies (Sang et al, 2019).…”