Urban expansion and rural landscape transformations in selected communities of Obafemi Owode local government area of Ogun State Nigeria

Abstract

The study examined urban expansion and rural landscape transformation in Obafemi Owode local government area of Ogun State, Nigeria. Primary and secondary data were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics and geospatial techniques of GIS and remote sensing. Snowball approach was used to select 102 respondents that were above 50 years of age who were aware of land use changes in the study area. Landsat imageries for 1987, 2003, and 2019 were used to analyse land use and land cover changes. Supervised classification was used to cluster pixels in data sets into different land use categories, namely; water bodies, vegetation cover, built-up areas, and open surface. The result showed that built-up areas (residential, educational, religious, and industrial area) have greatly increased from 12.62% in 1987 to 38.79% in 2019 while rural landscape (vegetation, farmland, grassland, and wetland) have considerably decreased during the same period from 87.37% in 1987 to 29.38% in 2019. The result of descriptive statistics revealed that scarcity of food and diversification of income was the major implications of rural landscape transformation in the study area. The study concluded that there was a persistent transformation from rural landscape to urban landscape through uncontrolled population growth and physical development in the study area.