Abstract
In this study a study of gully erosion in southeast Nigeria is presented. The study of gully development on a regional scale is currently undermined by the inherent costs associated with consistent field monitoring and the lack of historic measurements to perform time series analysis. As a result, there are very few studies which implement long term analyses of gullies in the region as a collective. Consequently, the building of knowledge of the role of environmental changes on the development of gullies is inhibited. Remote sensing methodologies, via the Landsat archive, are used as low economic data source that assisted in the analyses of gullies over the time period 1986 to 2015. The Landsat data is used to establish land cover changes over the time period, via pixel and object-based classification, to identify its role in gully development. The use of classification for this purpose identifies this study as a first of its kind in Nigeria. Aiming to link environmental characteristics and land cover changes with gully development and erosion rates at multiple current locations. In terms of the correlation between vegetation area and gully/openland development, Pixel based classification produced a correlation of r = -0.9 (p<0.05). A similar strength of correlation was exhibited for OBIA with r = -0.9 (p<0.05) with both results indicating a very strong and significant negative correlation between the amount of vegetated area and Gully/open-land development over the study period 1986-2015.
Highlights
Erosion has been recognized as one of the major causes of land degradation worldwide (Valentin et al, 2005)
The analysis was conducted for both the Object Based Image Supervised Classification (OBIA) and Pixel based classification methodologies incorporated in this study within a broader analysis of land cover change in the study area
A similar strength of correlation was exhibited for OBIA with r = -0.9 (p
Summary
Erosion has been recognized as one of the major causes of land degradation worldwide (Valentin et al, 2005). Erosion has attracted a growing interest as reflected by some international conferences at Leuven, Belgium (Poesen and Valentin, 2003), at Chengdu, China (Li et al, 2004) and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, May,2016. Some recent research works (Wu and Cheng, 2005; Onyekwere, 2001; Castillo and Gomez, 2016) have shown that the loess plateau of China, Orlu Nigeria and Cordoba, Spain land surfaces are being eroded, washed away and rendered sterile due to gully erosion. Erosion has been a growing concern to mainly the developing world which could be due to both intentional and unintentional activities of humans on the physical environment (Duke, 2012). Ofomata observed that about 2% of the area is fast becoming hazardous to human habitation because of gully formation and subsequent degradation in the area (Obiadi et al, 2011)
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