Effect of land use and land cover change on Kurmin Dawaki Forest Reserve, Zangon Kataf Local Government Area, Kaduna State, Nigeria

Abstract

Forest degradation as a result of land use and land cover change constitute the major source of  pressure on forest conservation and existence of forest estates. Today degradation of forest in recent times is not limited to natural forests as Land use and Land cover change are gradually getting into forest reserves and plantation. This calls for constant monitoring of LULC changes in our forest both natural, reserves and plantations. This study was carried out to assess LULC changes in Kurmin Dawaki Forest Reserve in order to promote sustainable management of the reserve. Data from this study was acquired from pre-existing satellite imagerie. Landsat 5 TM for 1997, Landsat 7 ETM+ for 2007 and Landsat 8 OLI for 2017 were down loaded from the United State Geological Survey website. Idrisi Terrset was used to perform a supervised maximum likelihood classification of the imagery. The result of the classification revealed three classes of Agricultural land, Grassland/Herbaceous Cover and Forest plantation. The percentage of land use and land cover (LULC) in Kurmin Dawaki forest preserve indicated that Agricultural land increased from 4.73% in 1997 to 5.27% in 2017. Grassland/Herbaceous Cover also increase from 10.43% in 1997 to 25.63% in 2017. The forest area decreased from 84.842% in 1997 to 57.93% in 2017. The magnitude of LULC change within 20 years period showed that 1.323 ha of the forest area was lost to other forms of land uses, Grassland/Herbaceous Cover increased by 1.26 ha within that period, Farm land also increased by 0.04 ha. It was established that LULC changes were going on in the Kurmin Dawaki forest preserve. Control of farming activities within the Reserve should be discouraged and reforestation of the Reserve was recommended.