Abstract
Remote sensing (RS) and GIS are important methods for land use assessment and land cover transition. In this study, land use/land cover changes in the Ago-Owu Forest Reserve, Osun State, Nigeria have been assessed. Landsat 5 TM, Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat 8 OLI were acquired for 1986, 2002 and 2017 respectively. The three scenes corresponded to path 190 and row 055 of WRS-2 (Worldwide Reference System). The processing of the imagery was preceded by the clipping of the study area from the satellite image. The boundary of the reserve was carefully digitized and used to clip the imagery to produce an image map of the forest reserve. Using the supervised image classification procedure, training sites were used to produce land use/land cover maps. The same classification scheme was used for the 1986, 2002 and 2017 images to facilitate the detection of change. The differences in the area covered by the different polygons between the three sets of images were measured in km2. The results show that during 1986 and 2017, there is a dramatic increase of build-up areas with a change of 55.65 km2 and sparse vegetation (farmland and grassland) with a change of 53.97 km2, while a dramatic decrease of dense vegetation (forest areas) with a change of 109.61 km2. The consequence of these results is that over the years, the population of people living in the forest reserve has increased and many of them are engaged in farming, leading to an increase in farmland. In addition, logging activities continued unabated in the forest reserve, as demonstrated by a sharp increase in the deforested area within the reserve. The maps produced in this study will serve as a planning tool for the Osun State Forestry Department to plan reforestation activities for the forest reserve.
Highlights
Changes in land use and land cover are increasing globally and causing significant environmental issues and need to be mapped (Ringrose et al, 1997)
The results of this study show how modern technologies such as remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) can serve as a tool measuring the extent and pattern of changes in landscape conditions over time which agrees with past work of (Quan et al, 2013; Gebiaw et al, 2018; Chen, 2002; Amna et al, 2015; Sekela & Manfred, 2019; Duguma, 2017)
For the effective management of forest land, conservation and planning of forest resources, precise, frequent and timely data are required. These data could be obtained through Remote sensing (RS) and GIS technologies
Summary
Changes in land use and land cover are increasing globally and causing significant environmental issues and need to be mapped (Ringrose et al, 1997). Change in land cover is a common phenomenon in all parts of the world. Such changes may be rapid (e.g. forest clearing for agriculture) or relatively slow (e.g. tree damage and death due to acid rain) (Skidmore, 2002) and may affect both socio-economic and ecological conditions (Aspinall, 2006). According to Phat et al (2004), the 21st century brought new challenges to forest management and forest ecosystems. This is potentially an extremely important tool for dealing with climate change, in addition to improving human actions (Cai et al, 2011). Policymakers and scientists need to know the spatial dimensions of land use and land use consistently in order to be sufficiently prepared to make informed decisions on land resources
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