TITLE:
Land Cover Dynamics and Assessment of the Impacts of Agricultural Pressures on Wetlands Based on Earth Observation Data: Case of the Azagny Ramsar Site in Southern Côte d’Ivoire
AUTHORS:
Kadio Saint Rodrigue Aka, Hyppolite N'da Dibi, Jephté N’dri Koffi, Crystel Natacha Bohoussou
KEYWORDS:
Azagny, Ramsar, Land Use, Wetland, Agricultural Pressure, Ivory Coast
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.10 No.5,
May
24,
2022
ABSTRACT: The
Azagny Ramsar site has been the scene of very strong agricultural pressures for
several decades. In Côte d’Ivoire, management policies, previously developed and
implemented in wetlands, remain very sensitive and vulnerable to environmental
changes. It is to overcome these environmental management difficulties that
this study was carried out to assess the impacts of mainly industrial
agricultural activities on the wetland. To achieve this goal, we mapped the
land use dynamics of the study area by a series of Landsat imagery from 1988, 2002,
2008, and 2019 and obtained 11 classes. The spatial analysis of the dynamics of
land use from these images has shown that the increase in agricultural
operations around the protected area has favored the reduction of several
ecosystems of natural plant formations (forests, savannas, mangroves) amounting
to 36.34% to the benefit of artificial plant formations such as rubber, oil
palm and coconut trees (42.73%). However, these losses of natural plant
formations are more accentuated outside the Ramsar site (peripheral zone) than
in the Ramsar site with the example of mangroves which have lost 3.27% of their
area in the Ramsar site against 33.80% in the peripheral zone between 1988 and 2019. These changes are less
accentuated in the Ramsar site than on the periphery thanks to the vigilance of
the Ivorian Office of Parks and Reserve (OIPR) and natural barriers
(watercourses) that surround it.