• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.40 no.2 s.107
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• pp.221-241
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• 2005

Land Use and Land Cover Changes (LUCC) occur over a wide range of space and time scales, and involve complex natural, socio-economic, and institutional processes. Therefore, modelling and predicting LUCC demands an understanding of how various measured properties behave when considered at different scales. Understanding spatial and temporal variability of driving forces and constraints on LUCC is central to understanding the scaling issues. This paper aims to 1) assess the heterogeneity of land cover change processes over the landscape in northern Ghana, where intensification of agricultural activities has been the dominant land cover change process during the past 15 years, 2) characterise dominant land cover change mechanisms for various spatial scales, and 3) identify the optimal spatial scale for LUCC modelling in a savanna landscape. A multivariate statistical method was first applied to identify land cover change intensity (LCCI), using four time-sequenced NDVI images derived from LANDSAT scenes. Three proxy land use change predictors: distance from roads, distance from surface water bodies, and a terrain characterisation index, were regressed against the LCCI using a multi-scale hierarchical adaptive model to identify scale dependency and spatial heterogeneity of LUCC processes. High spatial associations between the LCCI and land use change predictors were mostly limited to moving windows smaller than 10$\times$10km. With increasing window size, LUCC processes within the window tend to be too diverse to establish clear trends, because changes in one part of the window are compensated elsewhere. This results in a reduced correlation between LCCI and land use change predictors at a coarser spatial extent. The spatial coverage of 5-l0km is incidentally equivalent to a village or community area in the study region. In order to reduce spatial variability of land use change processes for regional or national level LUCC modelling, we suggest that the village level is the optimal spatial investigation unit in this savanna landscape.