SUITABILITY EVALUATION OF LAND USE LAND COVER OF IMO STATE FOR SUSTAINABLE ECOTOURISM DEVELOPMENT
Ogbuji, S. I.& Ede, P. N.
Department of Geography and Environmental Management,Imo State University, Owerri,
Institute of Geoscience and Space Technology, River State University, Port Harcourt
E-mail:sogbujiic@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT
This study seeks to establish the current status of the land use/ cover of Imo State going by the level of urbanization in the state, in order to determine the proportion of land available for sustainable ecotourism development in the state. The data used for this study were mainly secondary data obtained from the United State Geological Survey (USGS) website. The satellite data covering the study area which was obtained from earth explorer site was imported in ERDAS Imagine version 9.2 satellite image processing software to create a False Color Composite (FCC). The layer stack option in image interpreter tool box was used to generate FCCs for the study area. The sub-setting of satellite images was performed for extracting the study area from both images by taking geo-referenced out polygon boundary of Imo State AOI (Area of Interest). All satellite data were studied by assigning per-pixel signatures and differentiating the area into five land use/cover classes on the bases of the specific Digital Number (DN) value of different landscape elements. The delineated classes are; Built up area, Bare land, Light forest/Agricultural land, Water body and Dense forest. Based on experts opinion and literature, the most important land use/ cover for sustainable ecotourism development is dense forest while built-up area does not support ecotourism development. For each of the predetermined land cover/use type, training samples was selected by delimiting polygons around representative sites. Spectral signatures for the respective land cover types derived from the satellite imagery was recorded by using the pixels enclosed by these polygons, after which, maximum likelihood algorithm was used for supervised classification of the images. Classification accuracy was determined using an error matrix (sometimes called a confusion matrix). This is because image classification using different classification algorithms may classify pixels or group of pixels to wrong classes. The study revealed that light forest/ farm land constitute the largest proportion of the total land area (59.5% ) of the total land area, followed by built up area (21.3%) which has no value for ecotourism development, then dense forest (12.8%), the valuable ecotourism. Water body comprises 0.4% while bare land made up (6.0%) the remaining proportion. The study suggested that government should make and implement proper land use management policies for sustainable land utilization and tourism development.
Keywords: Suitability evaluation, Land use Land cover, Sustainable development, Ecotourism, Imo State.
