Mapping oil palm expansion within the protected lowland rainforest of Nigeria using Google Earth engine

Increasing demand for Elaeis guineensis (African Oil Palm) products both for domestic and industrial use has led to its continuous expansion. The influence of oil palm plantation establishment on the economic well-being of communities and ecosystems cannot be over-emphasised. The study focuses on the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations within all protected areas and forest reserves in the lowland rainforests of Ondo State, Nigeria using. Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) was used to map oil palm expansion using 10-metre resolution Sentinel-2A images for 2015 and 2020 in Google Earth Engine (GEE). We found expansion of both smallholder and commercial oil palm plantations within eight of the thirteen protected areas with three protected areas (Ipele, Onisere and Akure Ofosu) showing a significant increase in oil palm plantation establishment. The use of object-based classification techniques, which combines contextual information within the image domain to discriminate landscape features such as oil palm canopy features, was effective in delineating oil palm from the forest canopy and other crops. While Google Earth Engine, a server-based remote sensing domain with petabytes of data, is effective for monitoring large-scale tropical forests.