The Upper Guinean Forestsof West Africa are among the most vulnerable of the Earth’s tropical ecosystems to human-driven environmental change. They are considered climatically marginal, having the highest temperatures and longest dry seasons of all tropical forest systems worldwide. The region is also under enormous pressure from a rapidly growing human population and its demands for agricultural production as well as wood and other forest products. As a result, much of the original native forest cover has already been lost and the remnants are scattered in isolated fragments. Ghana has maintained a substantial area of closed canopy forest in a network of reserves. However, many of these reserves are at risk because of forest degradation combined with fire encroachment from surrounding agricultural areas. The unreserved matrix historically retained considerable native tree cover because of shifting cultivation, agroforestry practices, and local preservation of forest groves. Now, population growth and agricultural intensification are driving a trend toward lower native tree cover in the matrix. Given these numerous threats, there is a strong need for more precise geospatial information about the amounts and spatial patterns of forest degradation along with projections of the likely effects of future climate and land use change. There is also a need for capacity building so that policymakers and natural resource managers can continue to generate this information and use it to support decision making.Our work as part of the SERVIR Applied Sciences Team will encompass three major objectives. (1) Develop a workflow for using the Landsat archive to monitor tropical forest dynamics and 17generate a dataset of degradation and regrowth trends using the forested region of Ghana as a working example for the broader UGF region. (2) Develop a land change simulation model for tropical forest landscapes and project future forest conditions under alternative scenarios of climate and land use change. (3) Conduct training and capacity building to transfer knowledge and products to partners in the natural resource management sector in Ghana.This project builds upon our ongoing research on forest landscape change in West Africa.We have used a 30-year time series of Landsat images to study the influencesof fire-vegetation feedbacks on forest degradation and deforestation in several forest reserves. We have also conducted trend analysis of MODIS imagery to highlight patterns of forest cover loss across the broader West African region since 2001. Our SERVIR project will extend this work by developing a 15-year time series of Landsat imagery for Ghana and using it to map spatial patterns of forest degradation and recovery. We will also modify our existing Coupled Human and Natural Geospatial Environments (CHANGE) model to project future fire regimes and changes in forest land cover under scenarios of future climate and land use change. This model has already been developed and tested in temperate forest landscapes and is ready to be adapted to West African landscapes. The outcome will be a set of historical datasets and future projections that will be made available to partners in the natural resource management sector. We will also provide training in the use of our methods and transfer the tools and models that we develop to facilitate continued use of our techniques in the SERVIR West Africa region.