Analysis of Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Owerri Municipal and Its Environs, Imo State, Nigeria (2005 – 2015)

Land use/land cover changes in Owerri Municipal and its environs which included Orogwe, Ubomiri, Emii, Uratta, Ihiagwa and Egbu were studied as being driven by rapid population growth for urbanisation. The study applied the digital technology of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (ARC GIS 9.3 Version software). These tools were implored to generate land use/land cover maps for the period; 2005, 2010 and 2015 and to determine the area in km2 of each of the six classes of land use/land cover types, the percentage change of the total area covered, accuracy of the overall classification including the Kappa coefficient, while a classification scheme was used to develop the classified land use/land cover maps. Also satellite imagery for the period (2005-2015) was imputed into the ENVI 4.5 software environment, composited, digitized and exported to the Arc. GIS where they were clipped with the study area. The extracted image of the study area was then exported back to the ENVI 4.5 environment for Arc.GIS environment in TIFF format. This was followed by a colour separation in the imagery repeated for all the raw satellite imagery. Image interpretation was done on ENVI 4.5 software based on a set of pixels of the Region Of Interest (ROI). Results are that Kappa coefficient values were high enough for the period of study with 0.9099, 0.9557 and 0.9685 for 2005, 2010 and 2015 respectively indicating a strong agreement between the classified maps and ground referenced information. Integrating GIS and satellite remote sensing with high spectral, spatial and temporal resolution at the local scale to develop urban environmental monitoring, effective land use planning and management of the current growth pattern were among others recommended.