Spatio-temporal dynamics of the land use of Torodi, Gothèye and Tagazar township in the Tillabery region of Niger

Abstract

Man through his actions strongly distorts the use of land, causing a change in the natural environment. This impact makes it necessary to provide municipalities with land use maps and information relating to their condition and dynamics. It is with this in mind that a study of land use was carried out in three communes in western Niger. Its objective is to map and analyze the dynamics of the land use of these municipalities from the Landsat images of 1984 and 2000 and those of sentinel 2A from 2017. The supervised classification by maximum likelihood was applied and the dynamics was analyzed from curves and area calculations. The cartographic results made it possible to draw up land use maps by municipality. Analysis of the dynamics of land use shows that the areas of plant formations and fallows are declining over the entire study area. Crops and buildings rose respectively by 180.96% and 119, 81% in Torodi, 65.69% and 205.42% in Tagazar and 98.82% and 143.15% in Gothèye. The same is true for degraded areas and bodies of water which are experiencing increases and regressions over the entire study area. Agriculture, the exploitation of energy wood and demography are the main factors of degradation and mutation of the landscape. These results could serve as a basis for defining priority intervention areas for the restoration of degraded areas and the management of agroforestry forests and parks.