## 3 Results  
### Spatial Patterns of Land Use Land Cover  
The central geographic areas across the study area are dominated by agriculture and built-up classes interspersed with brush/woodland but distributed in a dispersed and fractured manner reflecting the fragmented nature of these forest and agrarian landscapes (Figure 5). The main forest areas are in protected forests--forest reserves. Dedza has concentrated forest areas, particularly in the eastern highlands of the Dedza/Salima Escarment that stretch across the Dedza/Salima Forest Reserve and Mua/Livuklezi Forest Reserve, central Dedza and southwestern Dedza (Chongoni Forest Reserve).. In contrast, Ntcheu was already more degraded than Dedza and much of the remaining forest cover is distributed on the western side where pronounced areas of shrub-woodland abound, reflecting forest degradation. Wetland land cover occurs along a latitudinal gradient mainly along river/stream courses in the northern-northeastern regions of Ntcheu. Surface water was detected mainly in the northeast region of Dedza. The 'other classes' category spreads to varying extents across both districts. This class constitutes unknown cover classes not covered by the seven main categories included in the land-cover class definitions for our study area (Figure 5). Findings for Dedza show significant changes in land cover across the major cover classes during the 18 years, dominated by the conversion of forest-mixed to agriculture and bare/barren lands (see Table 4). While remaining the dominant land-cover type, agriculture increased in area from 48.0% to 52.4% and 59.7%, respectively, across the three time periods. The share of barren land was relatively low in 2001 but doubled by 2019 (4.7%, 5.4%, and 9.6% in 2001, 2009, and 2019, respectively). Most notably, the largest decrease in forest-mixed was during the last 9 years (2009-2019), an approximately 8% drop from 24.4% to 17.4% of cover while wetland area remained moderate but with small decreases during the period (8-9%). Figure 5: Land-cover maps for Dedza and Ntcheu districts in 2001, 2009, and 2019. Summary land-cover statistics show more stability in land-cover classes for the already degraded landscapes (forest-mixed) of the Ntcheu district as revealed in the small changes in most land-cover classes over the 18-year study period (Table 5). Thus, agriculture cover remained within 36-39%, with the second time epoch (2009-2019) while experiencing some minor loss in agriculture land use, and low losses in built-up areas (13%, 11%, and 9%) for 2001, 2009 and 2019, respectively, while the forest-mixed class had (12%, 8%, and 10%) with gains observed during 2009-2019. Increases were also observed in the brush/woodland class across the three time points (9%, 15%, and 24%, respectively), indicating forest degradation. Wetlands class decreased by more than half between 2001 (15%) and 2019 (7%), and the 'other' class category had land-cover losses between 2009 (6.3%) and 2019 (3.1%). Agriculture and the barren classes registered modest increases while the shrub-woodland class registered the biggest increase from 15.1% to 24% suggesting forest degradation. Notably, findings show that while both deforestation (reduction in forest cover, 1.8%) and forest degradation (as illustrated by the increase in shrub/woodland cover, 15.5%) occurred during 2001-2019, the latter transition was much more (more than 8 times) dominant than the former. Spatially explicit examination of the land-cover transitions for Dedza (Figure 6) demonstrates that major persistent areas where land cover underwent no measurable change (yellow in the figure) were mainly agricultural lands and forested areas, particularly within forest reserves. Major transitions were mainly losses (red coloring) in the forest-mixed class and wetlands, and relatively gains (green coloring) in the agriculture class.