Indigenous Land Management Practices and Land Cover Change in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

Jacob Atser,Ekpa James,Ekong Faith,Uwem Ituen

doi:10.4236/jep.2014.516146

Abstract

This work sought and identified the different types of land covers; detected the changes in land cover and examined the driving forces of such changes in Ibiono Ibom Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Satellite images data of the area for 1986 and 2006 were collected for analysis. Household level social survey was conducted to generate data on the socio-economic variables. The images were subjected to principal component analysis to reduce and compress the data while the supervised image classification algorithm was applied to process the images into different land cover classes. The change detection algorithm in Erdas imagines was applied to measure and calculate the land cover change of the area. The result of the social survey revealed that 58% of the occupation was land based while in terms of yearly income, 65 percent earned less than $300 (#48000). The change detection carried out revealed an increase in areas of secondary forest while bush fallow recorded a reduction up to 34.02 hectares (56.55%) within the study period. Socio-economic variables of poor income and mode of land preparation for farming were the major drivers of change. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the slash and burn mode of land preparation be discouraged.

Highlights

Nature has provided some resources such as air, food, water, plants, animals and energy that could provide forHow to cite this paper: Atser, J., Faith, E., Ituen, U. and James, E. (2014) Indigenous Land Management Practices and Land Cover Change in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria
Information on the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents were collected on household basis, but aggregated at the local government level. This level of detail became very necessary since the different land use decisions and activities which feedback on the land cover to induce change takes place at the level of household
Five major land cover classes were identified in the study area

Summary

Introduction

Nature has provided some resources such as air, food, water, plants, animals and energy that could provide forHow to cite this paper: Atser, J., Faith, E., Ituen, U. and James, E. (2014) Indigenous Land Management Practices and Land Cover Change in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The utilization of natural resources by man has brought about economic implications of depletion such as neglect of future generations, incorrect price predictions, risk aversion, ownership uncertainty, monopoly, the distribution of benefits and taxation on certain natural resources. These depletion problems include constraints on supply and demand variables, exploitations of various unconventional sources, pollution, monopolization of resources, influence of technology and promotion of systematic exploitation [1]. It was observed that land cover including forests is socially, economically and environmentally important, especially tropical forests, which contains at least two-third of the world’s living organisms. It has been observed that of all the environmental concerns facing developing nations in the humid tropics, large-scale land cover has most certainly attracted world attention, and it is one of the most serious environmental problems facing Nigeria as a nation today

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