Spatio Temporal Land Use Land Cover Change Mapping of Malete Elemere: Implication on Development Planning of Emerging Communities

The use of Ecosystem and Biodiversity mapping, land use land cover change detection has been advocated in preparation of developmental master plan in towns and cities. Noticeable changes have been observed within Malete Elemere community since the establishment of Kwara State University Malete, yet its spatial pattern and socio ecological implication have not been investigated. This work seek to determine and produce land cover land use change map of Malete Elemere over the last 10 years and post 15 year periods through change detection techniques so as to evaluate the impact of the establishment of Kwara State university on the settlement spatial development. Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) satellite images of 2005, 2010 and 2015 of the study area were acquired from USGS at spatial resolution of 30 m. Radiometric correction were applied to all the images using radiance modules in Idrisi32 with radiance spectral value set at DN 0 (Lmin) and 255 (Lmax). An unsupervised classification was carried out on the composite images of bands 4,3,2,1 for all the selected years to identify possible maximum spectral reflectance classes, this was followed by supervised classification using training sample from the field survey from which image to image spatio-temporal changes statistics were extracted. To generate a prediction of LULC changes for 2025, Cellular Automata-Markovian transition estimator (CA-Markov) in Idrisi32 was used. Various Kappa statistics was used to evaluate the performance of prediction with an average K statistics of above 0.83 recorded. The result shows that built up area gained an astronomical increase (180%) between 2005 and 2015 while forest lost significantly (34%) within the same periods, with most of the gains occurring in 2010 and 2015 after the establishment of KWASU. By 2025, two Major growth pole centres will emerge along Malete Elemere Axis and one minor in Jenkunu Omoni Axis which will exert a great stress on infrastructural facilities and may create a chaotic condition if left unattended to.