Assessing the Environmental Impact of Poor Drainage in Bosso Town, Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

The research is to examine the environmental impacts of poor urban drainage system in Bosso town. Poor drainage system have become a problem which lead to soil erosion, flooding and other land degradation processes of the ground surface, gully erosion and excess surface water to the infrastructure and settlement which also lead to flooding. The research is also to locate the erosion prone areas and examine the drainage pattern within the study area, to identify and analyze the major environmental impacts of poor drainage in the study area. The data for the analyses was collected through terrain analysis on the study area with the aid of digital elevation model (DEM) from shuttle radar topographic mission (SRTM) and the drainage network of the study area was extracted through the interpolation of flow accumulation and flow direction from the SRTM data (DEM) using ArcGIS 10.3 software, the digital elevation model was further classified using image classification scheme feature in Idrisi software and an overlay of the DEM and google earth image of the study area to generate the risk map of the study area and Questionnaire was used which frequency-percentage technique was adopted as one of the techniques for the analysis. The analysis of frequency percentage is one of the first techniques used in the analysis of research data that were collected through the use of questionnaire. The frequency-percentage technique is relatively easy to analyze, present and interpret. Frequency percentage= 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑜𝑏𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑒𝑑𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 × 1001 . there are a lot of poor drainage system in the study area which have result to very high erosion risk zone attributed to low slope and high surface soil moisture while the very low risk zones can be attributed to factor such as high slope and low run-off respectively which the drainage should be linked to solve the problem of erosion and other land degradation processes.