Lifting the lid on Land Cover/ Use change and its effects on local ecosystems in the Bamenda highlands of Cameroon

The goals of this study were to use remote sensing and a Geographic Information System to track land use and cover change in Cameroon’s Bamenda highlands and to assess the effects of these changes on the local ecosystem. Supervised classification using the maximum likelihood classification algorithm was used to extract information from Landsat time series images from 2000 to 2018. The classification was relatively acceptable and effective in detecting land-use changes in the area. Between 2000 and 2010, farmland increased by 10.29%, and by 2018, it had increased by 14.39%. Similarly, plantations expanded by 15.07 km2 (4.1%) between 2000 and 2010, reaching 20.51 km2 (5.58%) by 2018, while built-up areas increased by 0.51% between 2000 and 2010, reaching 1.43% by 2018. These increases came at the expense of forest, savannah, and waterbodies, which were reduced by 3.93%, 10.33%, and 17.17%, respectively. Savannah had a strong negative correlation with a built-up area (R2 = 1), and plantation area (R2 = .98). As a consequence, the increase of built-up areas and plantation farms could be at the cost of the reduction in savannah and forestlands. On the whole, increased deforestation, growth in plantations, built-ups, and farmlands, have had an impact on the area’s ecosystem structure and functions. The findings are critical for developing environmental management policies and ecological integrity of the area. Water, energy, food security, climate mitigation, and agroecological sustainability policies, as well as their synergies and tradeoffs in the context of sustainable development goals, are important research areas.