A Fuzzy approach to modelling land cover changes in north-eastern Nigeria

This project has explored the use of GIS and Remote Sensing techniques to model and provide a better conceptualization of land cover changes using a Fuzzy approach in the northeastern part of Nigeria (Kukawa town bordering Lake Chad), The maps shows the spatial extent of the land cover changes. The ability and the capacity of GIS to provide answers to questions on where the changes have occurred will help the environmentalist and the policymakers in solving environmental related problems and in the management of the existing natural resources since the locations of the changes were identified. Fuzzy supervised classification using normalized sigmoidal fuzzy membership function was performed on the Landsat images of three dates and the classified maps inputted into GIS and the land cover changes modelled. The results shows that the dry soil was more intensive in 1992, whilst vegetation and moist soil were more intensive in 1984 and the water body was more intensive in 2000. The dry soil covers an area of 39.02% (1984), 48.27% (1992) and 39.98% (2000), whilst the moist soil occupied 46.37% (1984), 35.1% (1992) and 45.52% (2000), Vegetation on the other hand showed a continuous decrease from 19.23% (1984), 15.37% (1992) to 14.47% (2000) whilst water body continues to increase from 3.77% (1984), 6.67% (1992) to 7.27% (2000).