Threat of land-cover change in Cameroon 883
containing disturbance-sensitive wildlife. Understanding underlying land-use and land-cover change processes and patterns retrospectively at a detailed scale is important for conservation managers, as it can facilitate the development of sustainable socio-ecological management solutions for addressing current and imminent environmental challenges in these forests. Southern Cameroon is experiencing rapid forest loss
(Cheek et al., 1996; Ingram et al., 2017). The Littoral Region, in south-western Cameroon, has the largest area of continuous tropical forest, within the Nkam and Sanga- Maritime areas, bordering the Ebo and Dibamba rivers north of Cameroon’s industrial capital Douala. This area in- cludes the proposed Ebo National Park, which is among the few remaining intact forest landscapes in Africa north of the Sanga River (Potapov et al., 2017). However, Ebo Forest re- mains legislatively unprotected despite efforts to designate the area as a National Park. Ebo Forest provides important habitat for the Critically Endangered Preuss’s red colobus Piliocolobus preussi and gorilla subspecies Gorilla gorilla diehli and Gorilla gorilla gorilla, the Endangered Nigeria– Cameroon chimpanzee Pan troglodytes ellioti and drill Mandrillus leucophaeus, and the Vulnerable African forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis (Morgan et al., 2011, who also provide further details of the ecology and geography of the region). Given the unprotected status of Ebo Forest, it remains particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic pressures such as deforestation and hunting, especially considering the unprecedented scale and pace of deforestation in the surrounding areas. These threats remain unchallenged be- cause of delays in securing legal protection, thus threatening the long-term integrity of Ebo Forest. The Littoral Region of Cameroon also encompasses
Mount Nlonako, along the north-western axis of the region. Mount Nlonako has a rich diversity of amphibians, birds and reptiles but is subject to human incursions. Both Mount Nlonako and Ebo Forest are located in relatively close proximity to Douala (Mount Nlonako c. 89 km to the north-west of the city, and Ebo Forest c. 56 km to the north-east). With its proximity to wildlife habitat, Douala supports thriving markets for forest products and wildlife, many of which supply bushmeat. The high demand for for- est and wildlife products is a strong driver of the ongoing depletion of natural forest cover and biodiversity through logging and hunting in the unprotected forests of the Littoral Region and greater Cameroon (Morgan et al., 2011). It is therefore important to ascertain how human land-use actions affect unprotected high-value forests at the land- scape level across the wider Littoral Region, using com- bined remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS)-based analysis (Wiens et al., 2009;Willis, 2015), in the interest of environmental sustainability (Cetin, 2015). There have been no previous detailed studies of anthropogenic land-use/land-cover changes and their implications for
tropical forest conservation in the Littoral Region or in equa- torial Africa as a whole. The history of extensive forest loss in the Littoral Region
is poorly documented, and its drivers are poorly under- stood. Here, we provide spatially explicit land-cover change analysis and information about forest fragmentation. We also discuss the potential influence of these human actions on the long-term sustainability of natural forest conserva- tion. To achieve these aims, we addressed the following questions: (1) How have land surface dynamics changed in the Littoral Region from 1975 to 2017?(2) What are the drivers of land-cover change? (3) How may land-cover change imperil future conservation of critical biodiversity and wildlife habitats?
Study area
We examined a 13,845 km2 study area encompassing Ebo Forest (c. 1,500 km2) in the Littoral Region of Cameroon (Fig. 1). Mean annual precipitation in the area is 1,500– 2,000 mm in the northern and interior regions, and 2,000–3,000 mm in the southern and coastal zones. Mean annual temperature is 25–28 °C (Molua, 2009). The land- scape is relatively flat, although there are some areas of undulating terrain, and a few mountains rising to 1,200 m inside the boundaries of the proposed Ebo National Park (the proposed boundaries are currently under review). Human activities in the Littoral Region, such as unsus-
tainable levels of logging, selective logging, land clearing, farming and hunting, place the regions’ biodiversity (in- cluding that in Ebo Forest) under severe threat (Morgan et al., 2011; Whytock et al., 2016). Large-scale bushmeat wholesalers travel to local villages near Ebo Forest by timber trucks, motorcycles and taxis to buy bushmeat from hunters to supply the region’s rapidly increasing population (from 2.5 million in 2005 to nearly 3.5 million in 2015). In addition, the humid equatorial climate of the Littoral Region makes it a suitable location for oil palm plantations. Palm oil production is expanding rapidly, with small- to medium-sized oil palm plantations replacing lands previously used for crops such as cocoa and coffee (Feintrenie, 2012).
Methods
Study overview We assessed land-cover change in the Littoral Region based on the available historical remote-sensing images from Landsat-4 (multispectral scanner, 60 m resolution) for 21 December 1975 and Landsat-8 (operational land imager, 30 m resolution) for 26 December 2017. Land-cover data were integrated using GIS overlays of Google Earth and
Oryx, 2020, 54(6), 882–891 © 2019 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605318000881
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