Assessment of Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Kuje Traditional Urban Sector of the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria

This study assessed land use and land cover changes in Kuje Traditional Urban Sector of the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria. Multi-Criteria Remote Sensing and GIS techniques were adopted in this study. Moderate satellite images of the study area were obtained from Google Earth Pro for the period of 1992 and 2012, while the high-resolution satellite image for 2022 was acquired from SAS Planet, a geospatial tool that facilitates access to high-quality remote sensing data from various sources. The year 1992 was selected as the baseline year due to the significant urban expansion in Kuje following the relocation of Nigeria’s capital to Abuja in 1991, as well as the availability of high-quality satellite imagery for that period. Location data for verification of Land use and land cover characteristics were sourced using hand held GPS 60cx. The bands combinations were 4, 3, 2 for all the imageries. This study adopted the maximum likelihood classification (MLC) method, a supervised classification technique that uses the spectral signatures obtained from training samples to classify an image. ERDAS Imagine and ArcGIS 10.1 software’s were used for the analysis due to their compatibility with the dataset and classification techniques applied in this study. In the traditional Kuje urban sector, agricultural land use between the year 1992 to 2002 decrease from 237.27 to 220.28 hectares, bare surface increase with 7.064 hectares, built-up area had an increase of 43.85 hectares, vegetation cover decreases with 292.182 hectares of vegetal area coverage. Between the years 2002 to 2012, there was an increase in agricultural land use with 17.74 hectares, bare surface increased with 147.89 hectares, built-up area increased with 115.67 hectares while vegetation had the largest change in area with a decrease of area coverage with -282.196 hectares. Between 2012 and 2022 there was a loss in agricultural land use area coverage with -107.84 hectares, bare surface declined with -154.81 hectares, vegetation land cover also declined with -8.28 hectares while there was a massive increase in built-up area with 271.82 hectares. Generally, findings show a reduction in agricultural land use area, bare surface and vegetal cover but with consistent increase in the built-up area.