Abstract

Land use/land cover information is essential for a number of planning and management activities. The general patterns of land use/cover as they were recorded in remotely sensed data were discussed in this study. Multi-date satellite imageries (Landsat TM 1986, Landsat ETM+ 2001, Landsat ETM+ 2006 of 30m spatial resolution respectively and SPOT 5, 2007 of 10m spatial resolution) were obtained and used for the study. These images were enhanced, resampled, georeferenced and classified for the assessment of spatio-temporal pattern of land use/cover change in the study area. The study also utilized topographical map of the study area, derived from sheet number 247 of 1963, scale 1:50,000 to identify features, which were used as ground control point for image geo-referencing. ILWIS 3.2 Academic software was used to process the image data. The result of ground truthing was combined with visual image interpretation as training sites for supervised classification. Six different land uses/covers were identified and used to classify the image data. The results showed that the natural environments (vegetation, wetland resources, water bodies and mountainous terrain) were being threatened, as they reduced continually in the areal extent over time and space while the social environment (built up area) expanded tremendously. The study discovered that urbanization processes majorly responsible for land use/cover change in Lokoja. In conclusion, the study advanced our frontier of knowledge on land use/cover study by providing information on the status of natural and social environment in Lokoja, a confluence town, between 1986 and 2007 using remotely sensed images and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology.

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