Restoration 
Plantations and tree crop commodities 
Enhanced nutrition and food security 
Biodiversity, safeguarding and conservation 
Nationally determined contributions 
Bioenergy and biomaterials 
Blue carbon and peatlands 
Climate change adaptation 
Landscape governance 
Gender 
Silvopastoral systems 
Market-based agroforestry-forestry 
Farm-forest policy interface 
Agroecology 
Livelihood trajectory modelling and assessment 
Inclusive finance and business models 
Innovating finance for sustainable landscapes 
Public and private commitments to zero deforestation 
Orphan tree crops 
Effectiveness of approaches to sustainable supply 
Quality of FTA research for development 
Sentinel landscapes 
Foresight 
Seeds and seedlings delivery systems 
Smallholder tree-crop commodities 
Cocoa plantation is a major land-use system that influences the functional structure of the forest landscape in Ghana. As a key driver of forest landscape dynamics, there is no adequate existing information on the nature, extent and magnitude of land-use change associated with cocoa expansion into forests. Therefore, we have studied the land-use transitions and intensities by using image-fusion on vegetation indices (VI) and a digital elevation model (DEM) to detect and distinguish cocoa plantation from the forest and other vegetation types. This was followed by intensity analysis based on historical land-use changes. With the VI-DEM image, we mapped out different cocoa plantations from the forest and other vegetations with a higher degree of success. The land-use categories were clustered into five main types (closed forest, open-forest, cocoa, lands-in-transition and settlement) to evaluate the transition and intensities from 1986 to 2015. The results showed two main transition patterns, namely 1) the conversion of forest to settlement and cocoa plantation; 2) the conversion of closed forests to open forest, due to logging and conversion of cocoa plantation to lands-in-transition (LIT). The intensity analysis further revealed that expansion in cocoa plantation instead targets least resisted open-forest and LIT areas with an isolated localised fragment of the fringes of forest reserves. Generally, the study revealed that the VI-DEM image-fusion technique is effective for detecting and isolating cocoa plantations, forest and other land-uses with high accuracy. Estimation of cocoa-led deforestation improved after isolating cocoa plantations. Cocoa expansions target more often open-forest and lands-in-transition than closed-forest. When cocoa expansion occurs in closed-forest, it is episodic, localised and coincides with the early stage of the boom-bust pattern.
Authors:
Benefoh, D.T.; Villamor, G.B.; van Noordwijk, M.; Borgemeister, C.; Asante, W.A.; Asubonteng, K.O.
Subjects:
land use, deforestation, logging, cocoa, landscape
Publication type:
ISI, Journal Article, Publication
Year:
2018
ISSN:
0143-6228
