Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Land Use/Land Cover Change Trend of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria from 1986-2016 Using Remote Sensing and GIS

This research examines the spatio-temporal changes of Land use/Land cover of Akwa Ibom state from historical remote sensing dataset (Landsat TM, ETM+ and OLI images acquired on 1986, 2001 and 2016). Three set of Landsat images were classified into five land use/land cover classes (built up/bare lands, water, mangrove/primary vegetation, secondary vegetation and cultivated/mixed vegetation) using unsupervised and supervised algorithm in ERDAS IMAGINE and ArcGIS. The Overall Classification Accuracy and KAPPA (K^) STATISTICS was 91.50 % and 0.8301, 90.77 % and 0.8227, 91.81 % and 0.8491 for 1986, 2001 and 2016 respectively. The spatio-temporal analysis of the change trend indicated that from 1986 to 2016, built up/bare lands increased by 62, 828hectares (19.56 %), water bodies decreased by 3, 425 hectares (1.07 %), mangrove/primary vegetation decreased by 96, 333hectares (29.99 %), secondary vegetation increased by 97, 486hectares (30.34 %) and Cultivated/mixed vegetation decreased by 61, 191hectares (19.04 %). The result demonstrated that historical remote sensing images can be used to investigate change trend of land use/land over of the study area. Also, the result raises concern over the unabated alteration of the natural environment particularly the depletion of mangrove/primary vegetation and conversions of arable cultivated lands to settlements, thus, calling for urgent review of land use planning process