Assessment of Land Use/Cover Change Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques: A Case of Osogbo and Its Peripheral Areas in Nigeria

Abstract

The importance of accurate and timely information describing the nature and extent of land resources and changes over time is increasing, especially in rapidly growing city areas. Landsat satellite imageries of three different time periods, i.e., Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) of 1982, 2000 and 2018 were acquired by Global Land Cover Facility Site (GLCF) and earth explorer site, quantify the changes in the Osogbo and its peripheral areas from 1982 to 2018 over a period of 36 years. These data sets were imported in ArcGIS 10.3, ERDAS Imagine and IDRIS Selva, satellite image processing softwares to create a false colour composite (FCC), supervised classification methodology was employed using maximum likelihood technique. The images of the study area were categorized into four different classes namely Core-urban, Peri-urban, Vegetation, water body. The results indicate that during the last thirty-six (36) years, Core-Urban land and water body have been increased by 2.74% (38.20 km²) and 0.98% (13.69 km²) while Peri-Urban land, and vegetation cover have decreased by 0.35% (5.00 km²), and 3.36 % (46.87 km²), respectively. The results quantify the land cover change patterns in the city and its peripheral area and demonstrate the potential of multitemporal Landsat data to provide an accurate, economical means to map and analyse changes in land cover over time that can be used as inputs to land management and policy decisions.