ISSN 2360-7955
Abstract
Accepted 25th February, 2017.
Globally, land has significantly changed from one form to another in the past few decades. This dynamic nature of land varies between the developed and the developing nations. The objective of this study was to analyze the changes in landuse in Ika Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State. A spectral image data covering 2003-2008 and projected to 2012 was acquired for this study. A topo sheet of 2003 derived from an aerial photo, was collected from Akwa Ibom State Ministry of Lands and Housing. Also LandSat Imagery at 30m resolution was collected. The image interpretatation processes were carried out using Erdas Imagery 9.2 software. The two-way analysis of variance was used to test the hypothesis which states that there is no significant variation in landuse change during the study period. The result of the study indicated that between 2003 and 2008, forest changed by 154.57km2, bush fallow (257.84km2); farmland (1106.63km2) , compound farmland (406.86km2) and built up area (1409.43km2). Between 2008 and 2012, forest changed by (40.93km2), bush fallow (471km2), farmland (268.51km2), compound farmland (315.2km2) and built up area (562.13km2). Also, the result of the two-way Anova analysis revealed that there was a significant difference in land use change during the study period since the calculated value of 37.91 was greater than the table value of 16.32 at 0.05 level of significance.
Keywords: Dynamicity, Landuse, Resources, Agriculture, Map, LandSat, Imagery