Land Use and Land Cover Change in a Community-Managed Forest in South-Eastern Senegal Under a Formal Forest Management Regime

Abstract

While most studies of community forests in Senegal address issues in institutional and political arrangements for managing forests, this study was carried out to find out how these political and institutional changes embodied in the new approach to forest management impact on land use and land cover change in the country. Using the Missirah Forest in southeastern Senegal, as a case study, the objective was to quantify the land use and land cover changes that have happened over a twenty four-year period, from 1990 to 2014 using remote sensing. Six land use and land cover types were identified and mapped, namely, gallery forest, tree savanna, shrub savanna, degraded shrub savanna, croplands and settlements. The area of croplands and settlements expanded between 1990 and 2014. The conversion from natural vegetation to croplands (14.45%) was higher than the conversion from cropland to natural vegetation (3%). Between 1990 and 2003, the expansion in croplands was higher than between 1990 and 2003 but the reverse was the case for settlements. Regarding vegetation types, they decreased in cover between the two periods with the exception of shrub savanna that experienced an increase of 1.46% from 1990 to 2003. Transition to less wooded vegetation (31.58%) was higher than transition to more wooded vegetation (13.91%). This study shows that deforestation and forest degradation are still in progress despite the implementation of a management plan for a full rotation.

A Review Paper on Monitoring Environmental Consequences of Land Cover Dynamics with The Help of Geo-informatics Technologies

“…Different researchers use different system to collect reference data, also called ground truth. For instance, ground observation using GPS (Faye et al, 2016;Hailemariam et al, 2016;Park, 2016), aerial photography (Hailemariam et al, 2016), available thematic maps interpretation (Ghosh & Das, 2019;Sarkar, 2018) and Google earth images (Alqurashi &Kumar, 2013;Bisrat & Gizaw, 2018;Herold et al, 2002) can be used. The most common sampling system that is used for collecting reference data is simple random sampling, systematic sampling, stratified random sampling, cluster sampling, and stratified systematic (Padmanaban et al, 2017).…”

Land Use / Land Cover Change And Impact On Carbon Stocks In The Atacora Chain Of Mountains, A Biodiversity Hotspot In Benin (West Africa)

“…Similar patterns of land use trend over the time were described in other West African countries. These include studies in southern Burkina Faso (Ouedraogo et al, 2010), western Senegal, (Sambou et al, 2015) and south-eastern Senegal (Faye et al, 2016). A study carried out by USGS (USGS, 2016b) in a 38-year period (1975 to 2013) showed that the fastest average annual rate of cropland expansion in West Africa were found in Togo, Benin, Chad, Mauritania and Burkina Faso and in every country of the same region, agriculture was exerting pressure on the natural landscapes, replacing fragmented savanna, woodland and forests.…”