Recent Trends in Land Cover and Climate Across Ghana

As part of the adoption of the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015, Ghana committed to combating environmental degradation and climate change. Land cover change is a prominent method of measuring environmental change, as landscape changes often impact ecosystem integrity and biodiversity. Land cover is also interwoven with climate trends, as it can impact climate at local and global scales through changes in carbon storage and be affected in return by changes in climate which control species survival. This research analyzes recent trends in land cover and climate to better understand the challenges Ghana faces to meet its SDG goals. We created 30-m resolution land cover maps of Ghana for the years 2010, 2015, and 2020 to compare land cover conversion in the 5-year period before and after the adoption of the SDGs. Using a combination of Landsat imagery, PALSAR data, and the random forest classifier we produced both land cover and classification confidence maps for the entire country in Google Earth Engine. This study also uses approximately 30 years of spatial temperature and precipitation data to analyze recent climate patterns across time and space. We assess annual trends in climate as well as seasonal changes, using a combination of the Theil-Sen estimator, Kendall rank correlation coefficient, and Fourier analysis in TerrSets Earth Trends Modeler. By combining land cover change with regional climate patterns, we can better understand the pressures affecting Ghanas ecosystems and inform strategies to meet SDG goals.