Extent and Rate of Changes in Landuse/Landcover Around Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company, Chikun Local Government, Kaduna State

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities on land resulted in landuse/landcover change including vegetation. Landuse changes play a role in the sustainability of refinery because of associated environmental effects. Moreover, there is growing societal concern about the spatial and temporal scales of some types of conversions, such as deforestation and urbanization. This paper determine the extent and rate of changes in landuse/landcover as a result of establishment of Kaduna Refinery and petrochemical company. The study employed the used of Remote Sensing and GIS techniques in acquiring and analysing the data respectively. The 1974 Landsat 4 Multispectral Scanner (MSS) 60m resolution, 1986 Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) 30m resolution, 1999 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) 30m resolution and 2018 Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) 30m resolution images were used. A supervised Image classification method was used because of its high accuracy. This was carried out using ArcGIS 10.5 software. The built-up areas were constantly increasing, while vegetation and agricultural land were decreasing proportionally due to clearance to make room for the industry and settlements for staff and refinery attracted population. There is need for establishment of a programs that promote tree planting, must especially the exotics ones as they are the most threatened species in the area. The present agricultural land need to be preserve and new ones need to be open and expanded in order to improve the agricultural activities of the area.