Potentials and Characteristics of Landsat Imagery in Relation to Land Use /Cover in Okitipupa Metropolis, Ondo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Landsat satellite imagery plays a crucial role in providing information on land use/cover modifications on local, regional, and global scales, especially where aerial photographs are missing. Monitoring land -use changes from past to present tends to be time-consuming especially when dealing with groundtruth information. Determining the past and current land-use change on Earth's surface using Landsat imagery tends to be effective and efficient when high-resolution imagery is unavailable. This study employed the use of Landsat satellite imagery to assess the past and present land use/cover using supervised classification and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The result of the supervised classification land use/cover showed that forest cover and woodland undergo rapid loss, while farmland, wetland, built-up, and waterbodies tend to experience gradual loss. The NDVI demonstrated that farmland and forest cover was the most affected land use/cover. Hence, land use/cover of the study area is affected by human activities, such as intensive farming, population size, and deforestation.