Changing Vegetation Patterns in Yobe State Nigeria: An Analysis of the Rates of Change, Potential Causes and the Implications for Sustainable Resource Management

Abstract

The exploitation of natural resources for timberproduction, fuelwood use and conversion to agricultural land is increasing tosuch an extent that the sustainable use of many areas of the world is in doubt.This paper examines three decades of freely available Landsat satellite imagesof the northeastern part of Nigeria using a supervised classification basedtechnique to create maps of vegetation change in Yobe State. The maps are thenused to examine the temporal and spatial aspects of changes which have occurredin the context of previous evidence and literature. The results indicate thatthe vegetation of the area has drastically reduced since the 1970’s. However,as this study shows, the pattern of these changes is complicated and cannot beexplained by any single physical or anthropogenic causal factor. Similarly,evidence from ground truthing investigation indicates the importance offuelwood collection to the deforestation process within the region. Thisarticle shows the value of an existing remote sensing and image processingmethodology for the assessment of vegetation change in developing countries inrelation to the sustainable management of natural resources. The study alsodiscusses the overall change within the study area and discusses severalpotential causative factors of the observed patterns of change.