Item Details

Title: Quantifying Land Use Land Cover Changes in the Lake Victoria Basin Using Satellite Remote Sensing: The Trends and Drivers between 1985 and 2014

Date Published: 2020
Author/s: Robinson Mugo, Rose Waswa, James W. Nyaga, Antony Ndubi, Emily C. Adams and Africa I. Flores-Anderson
Data publication:
Funding Agency :
Copyright/patents/trade marks:
Journal Publisher:
Affiliation: Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development, Nairobi 00618, Kenya;
rwaswa@rcmrd.org (R.W.); jnyaga@rcmrd.org (J.W.N.)
2 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Somalia Programme, Nairobi 00100, Kenya;
antony.ndubi@fao.org
3 NASA SERVIR Science Coordination Office, Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL 35811, USA;
emily.c.adams@nasa.gov (E.C.A.); africa.flores@nasa.gov (A.I.F.-A.)
4 Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA
Keywords: remote sensing; Landsat; Lake Victoria Basin; land use land cover

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.