Abstract:
The Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) is a significant resource for five states within East Africa,
which faces major land use land cover changes that threaten ecosystem integrity and ecosystem
services derived from the basin’s resources. To assess land use land cover changes between 1985
and 2014, and subsequently determine the trends and drivers of these changes, we used a series
of Landsat images and field data obtained from the LVB. Landsat image pre-processing and band
combinations were done in ENVI 5.1. A supervised classification was applied on 118 Landsat scenes
using the maximum likelihood classifier in ENVI 5.1. The overall accuracy of classified images was
computed for the 2014 images using 124 reference data points collected through stratified random
sampling. Computations of area under various land cover classes were calculated between the
1985 and 2014 images. We also correlated the area from natural vegetation classes to farmlands
and settlements (urban areas) to explore relationships between land use land cover conversions
among these classes.