**Abstract**

Forests play an important role in the ecological, environmental, socio-economic and cultural lives of people. However, human-nature-forest interactions bring imbalances in the state of these resources, hence the need to monitor and manage the forest proactively. This chapter, therefore, assessed the gains and losses of three national parks in Ghana (including Mole, Digya and Kakum) for the period 1986 to 2020. Landsat TM and Landsat8 OLI images were used for the assessment. The Digya National Park has a spatial extent of 4121.89 km2 . In 1986, the extent of the close forest cover was 88.0% of the park and it declined to 82.8% in 2020, a loss of 6.2%. The Kakum National Park covers an area of 463.42 km2 . The close forest cover was 90.15% and 89.52% of the extent of the park in 1986 and 2020, respectively. The Mole National Park covers about 4602.19 km2 . In 1986, 86.73% of the park was open forest, which was reduced to 80.83%, a loss of 5.90%. The study revealed 67% of open forest degradation, 33% loss of close forest and a reported ritual bushfire, wood harvesting and lumbering as the unsustainable practices in the forests. Reclamation of degraded areas is recommended to the Forestry Commission.

**Keywords:** forest cover, protected areas, forest reserves, gain, loss, degradation

### **1. Introduction**

The forest-human and forest-nature relationships lead to dynamics in the state of many forests across the globe. Forest dynamics thus play a critical role in the services forests provide in support of nature and humankind. The events of climate change and its impacts have increased the need and awareness to monitor the state of forests across the global community.

In spite of the fact that it forms part of the worldwide most valuable resources, the world forests are in a state of fluidity with quickening losses in some regions and gains in others around the world [1]. Forest is a more complex concept ranging from viewpoints of administrative unit, type of land use, and/or type of land cover [2]. The land cover view is however considered for this study. Forest therefore means an ecosystem branded by extensive tree cover, frequently consisting of stands varying in features such as species composition, structure, age class, associated plantations, and wildlife [3]. In each case, forest plays a pivotal role

in the development of economies of many countries worldwide [4], especially those within the African continent and particularly the sub-Saharan region where Ghana is located. Forest has been a gainful commodity to the improvement of both humankind and nations and many people have substantial value towards its restoration, conservation and management [5–7]. It provides livelihoods for people, especially the poor [8], serves as attraction for tourists, contributes to the gross domestic product (GDP) and serves as a source of revenue for socio-cultural infrastructure of many nations [9, 10] and Ghana is no exception. Thus, many Ghanaians and the rural folks in particular basically depend on forest productivities for survival and livelihood ventures.

Forest productivity is dependent on the state and nature of the forest [11]. In their study on the importance of forest structure to biodiversity-productivity relationships, for instance, [12] find various relationships (i.e. increasing, constant and decreasing) between species richness and forest productivity for different forest structure classes. This suggests that the structure of any forest including the reserves might determine its diversity. An assessment of the state in terms of gain or loss in extent and quality of forests has therefore become imperative for forest restoration, conservation and management purposes. However, the trend of forest gain and loss indicates a serious global consequence due to the continuous deterioration of forest areas [13, 14]. Hansen et al. [1] conclude that the forest regions have experienced theatrical loss in the last three decades, when they find higher gross forest cover losses compared to the gains in their study on global forest cover based on the analysis of Landsat images across the boreal forests in some selected countries.

Although forests have generally been depleting and many of the reserves are being threatened by both natural [15–17] and anthropogenic factors worldwide [18–21], the menace has been pronounced in Ghana thwarting national commitments to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), national development, making the livelihoods of many forest-dependent populace extremely vulnerable [22] and eventually exposing them to climate change risks in the last three decades [23]. Ghana is a net emitter of CO2 emissions and contributes to the global imbalance of greenhouse gases and their effects on climate change [24, 25].

The situation of forest degradation even becomes more critical at the beginning of the twentieth century when the pressures posed by anthropologic activities (mainly lumbering, cocoa farming and mining) on the natural forest pushed for the demarcation of portions of the natural forests as forest reserves (protected areas). This was done to protect ecologically sensitive areas, habitat for endangered species and enhance the tourism potential of the country. Extant studies have extensively covered the conservation and management of these forest reserves [5, 26, 27]. However, assessment of the trend of gain and loss of forest reserves and potential implications of the dynamics for forest policy advancement is less studied in Ghana [28], and hence remains a niche in the literature. That is, although some countries in the world have progressed from loss to gain in forest cover [29], Ghana's situation is yet to be ascertained. Therefore, the study was aimed to assess the state of the Ghanaian forest reserves over the last three decades. To accomplish this, we focused on three major forest reserves—Mole, Digya and Kakum National Parks, and employed remote sensing and geographic information systems methods [30–32] to ascertain the trend of the gain and loss (i.e. degree of degradation) of these

*Gain and Loss of Forest Cover in Ghana's Forest Reserves in Three Selected National Parks DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109823*

forest reserves and how the trend potentially influence forest policy development in Ghana and even beyond. By this, we contribute first to other scholars' proposal of integrating the political, socio-economic and methodological aspects to upscale restoration efforts in tropical forest regions around the globe [33]; forest transformation agenda [34]; and the achievements of national and international conservation goals and treaties [35]. The rest of this chapter covers methodology, findings and discussion, and conclusion.
