Monitoring of Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Mt. Pulag National Park Using Landsat and Sentinel Imageries

The degree of land use and land cover (LULC) conversion of Mt. Pulag National Park (MPNP), Benguet Province, Philippines, from 1990–2020 was assessed to provide valuable information for land resource management strategies. The increasing demand for vegetable farming threatens the park with further degradation. The magnitude of changes in the LULC of MPNP was determined using Landsat 5 for 1990–2010 and Sentinel-2 for 2020. The FLAASH (Fast Line-ofsight Atmospheric Analysis of Hypercubes) algorithm was performed to enhance the reflectance of the satellite images before data analysis. The maximum likelihood classification (MLC) was used to classify the MPNP into five LULC changes: agricultural lands, barren lands, built-up areas, forest lands, and grasslands with areal percentage cover of 15.88, 0.26, 1.34, 80.51, and 2.01%, respectively, in 2020, and overall accuracy of 90.58%. The LULC percentage of change from 1990–2020 showed that agricultural areas increased by 8.96%, barren lands decreased by 2.14%, built-up areas increased by 1.02%, forest lands decreased by 8.35%, and grasslands increased by 0.51%. The results showed that the increasing area of human-induced LULC class such as the agriculture lands and built-up areas is the primary cause of forest land loss. However, the barren lands undergoing natural regeneration contribute to the gain of the forest area. Therefore, the LULC conversion pattern serves as a warning that the park will continue to lose a significant portion of the forest due to land conversion if no intervention is done.