Deforestation is a global environmental challenge that threatens food security, resilience, and disaster risk reduction. By disrupting vital ecosystem services like clean water provision, fertile soil maintenance, and climate regulation, it heightens the ecosystem and human population vulnerability to natural hazards such as floods, landslides, and droughts. Sierra Leone's Western Area Peninsula National Park (WAPNP) exemplifies these challenges. Despite full legal protection since 2012, illicit land appropriation, mining, and logging are jeopardizing ecosystem integrity. The limited uptake of institutional enforcement measures and digital technologies in conservation further reduces management effectiveness. This study assesses the extent of WAPNP’s closed canopy tropical moist forest cover, one of the last remaining primary forest patches in the country and habitat of the critically endangered western chimpanzee (<em>Pan troglodytes verus</em>). The study uses Sentinel-2 satellite data to map forest cover and extent changes from 2020 up until the start of 2024, supplemented by very-high-resolution imagery for validation and accuracy assessment. The results demonstrate their application and effectiveness to uncover the spatial forest cover loss dynamics of closed-canopy forest in Sierra Leone, revealing recent changes in a key protected area. The study findings contribute to a growing body of research advocating full exploitation of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and open access ancillary forest-related datasets in optimizing land cover classification and forest monitoring. Moreover, the findings provide useful insights for integrating remote sensing tools into conservation efforts and Nature-based Solutions initiatives, supporting more informed and effective ecosystem monitoring and management strategies.