Studying Land Cover Change In The Goviefe Todzi Sacred Forest, Volta Region Ghana

Abstract

Sacred natural sites can be defined as any place in nature possessing a unique spiritual significance to peoples and communities. Throughout the world, sacred natural sites support ecological biodiversity, provide habitat stepping stones, and play a crucial role in the continuation of traditional spiritual practices. These variables in combination create a unique biocultural landscape that warrants conservation and conversely, sacred sites offer a mode of conservation. This research examines land cover change within the Goviefe Todzi sacred forest, located in Ghana’s Volta region, using satellite imagery. We utilized techniques in digital image processing to generate land cover classification maps of the study area for 2012 and 2015. Land cover classifications of high resolution QuickBird-2 and WorldView-2 imagery informed the hypothesis that closed forest cover within the sacred site decreased at a lesser rate than neighboring non-sacred closed forest cover. The Global Forest Change dataset from the University of Maryland framed our understanding of how forest cover changes within the study area and how it fits into the global context of forest cover change. Results demonstrated that the Goviefe Todzi sacred forest exhibited less closed forest loss when compared to non-sacred forest and closed forest was most often converted to open forest in the event of a land cover change. We recognized that other factors such as accessibility to nearby settlements, pre-existing agricultural fields, the time span of the study, as well as the topography of the sacred forest may also contribute to its lack of closed forest loss.