Social and Spatio-Temporal Modelling of Peri-Urban Land Use/Land Cover

This book analyses the perceived and the actual land use and land cover changes, with special reference to vegetation cover in a peri-urban environment within the Bosomtwe District of the Ashanti region of Ghana, as the case study. Invariably, there are different perspectives on how the changing landscapes are perceived. From the social perspectives, observation and perceptual interpretations are the main approaches of qualitatively describing the land use and land cover changes. In situations of human perceptual limitations, it is imperative, to employ quantitative tools of modelling the actual land use and land cover change dynamics occurring in the environment. This, the book approaches from the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative design used among 270 household respondents from 14 communities, to collect socioeconomic data, which was analyzed with embedded tools in the Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS v.17) software. This was juxtaposed with the application of satellite Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System methods for three different Landsat TM/ETM+ images; 2002, 2007 and 2010. The detailed results are worth exploring in this book.