Spatio-temporal analysis of land use transition and urban growth characterization in Benin metropolitan region, Nigeria

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Over the years, urban spatial growth has initiated enormous amount of changes in land use configuration worldwide. Such modification has provoked the development of urban sprawl and massive land use replacement which poses serious threat to sustainable development. Consequently, numerous researches on urban growth and land use change have emerged from mostly developed countries. In cities of developing countries like Nigeria cities, there is limited understanding because of the few amount of studies in this topic, and most of which lack empirical groundwork. Hence, the need to conduct more quality researches arises in order to achieve significant understanding of the spatial pattern of land use transformation and dynamics of urban landscape. Such information would assist spatial planners to enact legislation pertaining to urban system, especially in cities of developing countries like Nigeria where empirical studies on this topic are limited and state-of-the-art tools for analyzing and measuring sprawl processes are lacking. Multi temporal remotely sensed data was utilized in this study in collaboration with GIS techniques, spatial metrics and indications. Landsat data of three temporal periods covering Benin metropolitan region were classified this revealed unprecedented and unique land use transition process were urban and forest lands have substantially replaced agricultural lands. As evident from the result of the study, substantial amount of agricultural communities mostly along the inter-state roads have become urbanized. The analysis shows that urban growth tend to double in size every 12 years with high magnitude of region-wise sprawl as shown by Shannon's entropy and such sprawl degree is largely influenced by the existing trunk roads. Zone-wise, metrics and Shannon's entropy revealed that Northeast and Southeast zones exhibit stronger sprawl tendency and have also turn out to be growth hotspot in the region. In addition, incremental spatial autocorrelation identified two distinct regime of urban expansion in the region, compaction regime covering 7km radius from the centroid and edge expansion regime which exhibits dispersion with intermittent cluster peaks. This is supported by the result of landscape spatial metrics which indicates that urban land use aggregative force is more pronounced around the centroid and became more fragmented as built-up patches sprawl towards the city edge. The results show the effectiveness of integrating GIS methodology, spatial metrics and indicators to analyze spatiotemporal remote sensing data in order to assist urban planning and legislation.