Abstract
Land is a basic, definite and important natural resources which supplies most of man’s food. However, urbanization has remains the major threats challenging the sustainability of agricultural lands in most major growing cities of the developing countries. This research work was carried out to assess the impacts of urbanization on arable land in Makurdi town. The study used Remote Sensing and GIS with satellite images to analysis, mapped and quantified the land use types and extent at which agricultural lands are lost to urbanization within the study period. The findings revealed that the land use types had changed significantly within the study period. The result also shown that, the study area has lost 200km<sup>2</sup> of agricultural land representing 19% of the total landmass to urbanization within the study period. Built –up has gained 336km<sup>2</sup> representing 32% of the total landmass of the study area within the same period. Thus, the study area has emerged from being predominantly rural area to a city with an appreciable urbanization level. The study recommended that: i. effective and proper management strategies to control urban expansion to agriculture lands by the government are taken such as integrating agricultural land use into urban land use planning. ii. Proactive measure is taken by all stakeholders in the study area towards a better understanding of the changing pattern of land use of the area.
Highlights
Urbanization is rapid and the foremost threat facing arable lands in most major growing cities of the developing world, where globalization, major economic restructuring and lack of rural employment opportunities provoked an exodus from rural areas to urban centers [1,2,3]
The secondary data are satellite images acquired from United State Geological Survey (USGS), in 1994, 2004 and 2014 which were used for land use land cover (LULC) classification
This research work displayed the ability of Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing in analyzing spatio-temporal dynamics of urbanization
Summary
Urbanization is rapid and the foremost threat facing arable lands in most major growing cities of the developing world, where globalization, major economic restructuring and lack of rural employment opportunities provoked an exodus from rural areas to urban centers [1,2,3]. According to [6], urbanization is the horizontal or vertical outward extension of urban area over the adjacent agricultural land; it is a natural process which consumes many hectares of arable lands from their surrounding every year It comes about through the transformation of non-urban land into urban land and such a transformation of land is one way, and once transformed, it is very difficult to return urban land back to the original land use [7, 8]. The integration of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a powerful and effective tool in detecting, analyzing, monitoring and mapping urban expansion, urban land use, and land use/land cover changes [6, 10] It is for this reason that this research effort is made towards examining the amount of arable land loss to urbanization in the study area using Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques
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