Assessment for the Influence of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on Flood in Lavun Local Government Area, Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

Flood disaster is a common phenomenum in the study which frequently occur and need to be investigated. The study aimed at identification and Map out of flood vulnerable areas in Lavun Local Government Area for effective mitigation strategy. Field measurement, GIS and RS were also used in obtaining the data. Land use and land cover of the study area between 1990 to 2020 Image processing was carried out to manipulate and interpret digital data which involves some basic operations namely; image enhancement to increase the interpretability of features by increasing apparent contrast among various features, image classification on the other hand is assigning each pixel to a given class. The data were analyzed using supervised classification. The result shows that, built-up areas have been on increase from 163.85 km2 (5.77%) in 1990 to 433.34 km2 (15.24%) in 2020. The work concluded that, settlements are on the increase towards the floodplain which implies an increasing vulnerability of the built-up areas to flooding. It was recommended that, the communities that are discovered to be highly vulnerable to flood should be relocated and discouragements of future settlements in flood prone areas.