LANDUSE/LANDCOVER OF lWRNO .AND IT'S ENVIRONS IN SOKOTO STATE OF NIGERIA.

Abstract

The study of landuse/landcover is very important for many reaso~ The land is a renewable resource from which man's activities derive the necessities for life as well as those for his ~v xury. The knowledge of our resource base is in jeopardy, filled with either a lot of guess work, part of which includes misinformation which are either correct initially or outdated. The area of this study Wurno and its environs which lies in the desert fringes is susceptible to desert encroachment. There is therefore the need to monitor it continously to arrest the situation. The main objectives of this study were to determine or to classify the various landuse/landcover .~Wurno and its environs; using visual and digital methods and to compare the efficiency of the two methods i.e visual and digital techniques. For the above to be achieved, landsat multispectral scanner 5 of 1985 was used. In the visual analysis, magnifying lenses and the familia liarisation of the researcher with the study area was used for interpretation and classification. Maximum likelihood approach was used for digital analysis. The findings indicated that ten (10) classes ,f landuse/landcover were indentified by the visual classification system. Twelve (12) classes resulted in the digital classification system. In the visual classification the dominant landuse/landcover was sandy soil with 6.11 hecteres (24.37%), while laterite surface with 9.88 hectares (39.39%) was the dominant landuse/landcover in the digital analysis. While it takes very little time for the digital to be accomplished, the visual analysis is time consuming, labour intensive. but cheap and does not require much training to be carried out. However the digital analysis was faster, more likely to accurate but capital intensive and requires much expe~tise to be carried out. This study could be improved upon by making use of the multi-temporal satellite data.