Monitoring the dynamics of land use in Côte d’Ivoire

Poor land use and land cover practices, including deforestation and agricultural expansion, are deteriorating the natural resources of Côte d’Ivoire. The objective of this study is to monitor the evolution of land use in Central Côte d’Ivoire from 1987 to 2012 and to propose a future scenario for its sustainable management. The method of the study was based, on the one hand, on the processing of satellite images and GIS, for the analysis of the dynamics of land use and on the other hand, on the CA_Markov model, for the prediction of land use. It emerged from this study that the thematic maps produced at the end of the image processing allowed to highlight the spatio-temporal dynamics of the land cover. Over the period studied, a decrease in the area of forest was noted in favor of savannah and bare soil. A land cover scenario for the years 2012 and 2020 was simulated with an accuracy of 64%. Furthermore, the study revealed that biophysical and socio-economic factors are the main underlying causes of forest regression.