Quantifying land use land cover changes in the Lake Victoria basin using satellite remote sensing: The trends and drivers between 1985 and 2014

Abstract:

The Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) is a significant resource for five states within East Africa, which faces major land use land cover changes that threaten ecosystem integrity and ecosystem services derived from the basin’s resources. To assess land use land cover changes between 1985 and 2014, and subsequently determine the trends and drivers of these changes, we used a series of Landsat images and field data obtained from the LVB. Landsat image pre-processing and band combinations were done in ENVI 5.1. A supervised classification was applied on 118 Landsat scenes using the maximum likelihood classifier in ENVI 5.1. The overall accuracy of classified images was computed for the 2014 images using 124 reference data points collected through stratified random sampling. Computations of area under various land cover classes were calculated between the 1985 and 2014 images. We also correlated the area from natural vegetation classes to farmlands and settlements (urban areas) to explore relationships between land use land cover conversions among these classes. Based on our land cover classifications, we obtained overall accuracy of 71% and a moderate Kappa statistic of 0.56. Our results indicate that the LVB has undergone drastic changes in land use land cover, mainly driven by human activities that led to the conversion of forests, woodlands, grasslands, and wetlands to either farmlands or settlements. We conclude that information from this work is useful not only for basin-scale assessments and monitoring of land cover changes but also for targeting, prioritizing, and monitoring of small scale, community led efforts to …

Año de publicación:

2020

Keywords:

Fuente:

google