Change Detection for the Past Three Decades Using Geospatial Approach in Lake Chad, Central Africa

Abstract

Lakes are extremely touchy and dynamic parts of the earth and have a pivotal part in the farming, environment, industrial and domestic purposes. In Central Africa, Lake Chad Basin (LCB) has observed an uninterrupted decrease in its water level for the past decades as a result of certain variables such as climate change and over-abstraction, and likewise part of dry spells. The aforementioned challenges have serious effects on the standard living of the people in a particular area as well as the lake natural resources. The current study was planned to assess the changes of a lake for the past three epochs, then the Lake Chad satellite imageries include OLI, ETM+, and TM were evaluated with a view to came up with some land cover changes throughout these epochs: 1985, 2000, and 2015. All the scenes were subjected to the pre-processing stage to ensure the originality of the information, and "supervised classification was implemented for land cover change analysis. Then the overall accuracies of the classification of Landsat-TM is 93.80, Landsat-ETM+ is 90.80, and Landsat-OLI is 86.20 respectively. The outcome demonstrates that there is a continuous decline of water bodies, barren land, and shrub, with a rapid increment of farmland and gallery forest".