TITLE:
Indigenous Land Management Practices and Land Cover Change in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria
AUTHORS:
Jacob Atser, Ekong Faith, Uwem Ituen, Ekpa James
KEYWORDS:
Indigenous Land Use Practices, Land Cover Change, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.5 No.16,
November
28,
2014
ABSTRACT: This work sought and identified the different types of land covers;
detected the changes in land cover and examined the driving forces of such
changes in Ibiono Ibom Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria.
Satellite images data of the area for 1986 and 2006 were collected for
analysis. Household level social survey was conducted to generate data on the
socio-economic variables. The images were subjected to principal component analysis
to reduce and compress the data while the supervised image classification
algorithm was applied to process the images into different land cover classes.
The change detection algorithm in Erdas imagines was applied to measure and
calculate the land cover change of the area. The result of the social survey
revealed that 58% of the occupation was land based while in terms of yearly
income, 65 percent earned less than $300 (#48000). The change detection carried
out revealed an increase in areas of secondary forest while bush fallow
recorded a reduction up to 34.02 hectares (56.55%) within the study period.
Socio-economic variables of poor income and mode of land preparation for
farming were the major drivers of change. Based on the findings, it is recommended
that the slash and burn mode of land preparation be discouraged.