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 C#244;te d’Ivoire

摘要

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.