An Assessment of Land Use/Land Cover Changes in a Section of Niger Delta, Nigeria

Remote Sensing and GIS offer quick and efficient approach to the classification and mapping of land use/land cover changes over space and time. Information on changes in resource classes, direction, area and pattern of land use-land cover classes form the basis for future planning. Specifically, the land use/land cover types for the years 1986 and 2008 were studied and compared. The data products used in the study are Landsat TM imagery of 1986 and Nigeriasat-1 imagery of 2008. The data sets were put into Arcview GIS environment for geo-referencing and on-screen digitization of the needed layers. The land use-land cover layers for 1986 and 2008 were therefore generated. The magnitude, trend and annual rate of change analysis were generated from the land use-land covers for the years-1986 and 2008. The annual rate of change was then used as the basis for the projection of the 2050 land use-land cover situation of the study area. The findings show that there was high rate of land use-land cover change leading to decimation of sources of livelihood and resettlement of the people.