ASSESSMENT OF URBAN LAND USE ENCROACHMENT ON AGRICULTURAL LAND IN CHIKUN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, KADUNA STATE, NIGERIA USING GIS AND REMOTE SENSING

Abstract

Land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics have become one of the most significant indicators of environmental transformation globally, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions of developing countries. Anthropogenic activities largely drive these changes and have profound implications for ecological sustainability, agricultural productivity, and socio-economic development. The sudy aimed at assessing the encroachment of urban land uses on agricultural land which leads to disappearance of fertile land uses for agriculture in chikun local government area for a period of 2011 and 2023 and the aim was achievd through the following sthe following s objectives, wich are identify the different urban land uses in the study area; examine the extent of encroachment of urban land uses on agricultural land in the study area; identify the negative effect of covering agricutural land use and vegetation into urban land uses. The data used for the study were Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data from 2011. Landsat 7 (ETM+) of 202017, Landsat 8 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) of 2017 (ETM+ of 2023); all were sourced from the National Center for Remote Sensing (NCRS), Jos. Supervised image classification using a maximum-likelihood algorithm was applied to the three images. Five land-use classes were identified: built-up area, vegetation, bare surface, rock outcrop, and water body. Accuracy assessment was performed on the output images from 2011, 2017, and 2023, using error matrices to assess the accuracy of each image. The findings revealed a significant increase in built-up area from 464. 5km2 to 1207.7km2 and 1207.7 to 1718.65 km2 in 2011,2017 and 2025 respectivily. The most direct economic consequence of decreasing agricultural land is the farmer’s loss of profits from agricultural production; decreasing agricultural land also results in food insecurity.