Land use and land cover change Assessment in Kaduna metropolis, northern Nigeria (1995 – 2015)

Abstract

Land use/land cover changes were studied in Kaduna metropolis from 1995 to 2015 through the application of remote sensing data in GIS environment. The data used comprise of Landsat TM of 1995, ETM+ of 2005 and OLI of 2015. Colour composites using Bands 4, 3 and 2 were made for TM and ETM+ while bands 5, 4 and 3 was made for OLI image. The images were resampled to a common UTM and were radiometrically calibrated using the Chavez's Cos (t) model. A total of 220 GCPs were used for supervised classification of identified LULC classes. Maximum likelihood algorithm was used in Ilwis 3.7 GIS software for the classification of the three datasets before changes were estimated and compared among the datasets. Results revealed that vegetation was estimated as the largest land cover during 1995 and 2005 with about 783.0 km2 (65.51%) and 538.9km2 (45.08%) respectively, but had been converted to urban built-up by 2015 by about 320.3km2 (26.80%). This translates to about 462.7km2 (38.71%) of vegetation conversion to urban built-up and related uses within a period of 20 years only. The study concluded that rapid changes observed in LULC in Kaduna metropolis were largely occasioned by rapid urban population growth, urbanization, migration and socio-economic developments witnessed during the last two decades of political dispensation.