Remote sensing of vegetation cover changes in the humid tropical rainforests of Southeastern Nigeria (1984–2014)

Abstract This study demonstrates a 30-year multi-temporal variations in vegetation cover changes as a means of filling the vegetation knowledge gap in the humid tropical forests of southeastern Nigeria. Landsats 4TM, 5TM and 7ETM+ data-sets were accessed and analysed using the Maximum Likelihood Classification algorithm to discriminate and geovisualize the spatiotemporal variations in the general vegetation and other land cover types, from 1984 to 2014. This was supported with detailed field surveys in dry and rainy seasons of 2011 and 2014 to ascertain the status of wide-ranging vegetation cover stands. A 44% vegetation decline was recorded given the reduction in dense vegetation spatial extent from 330.63 km2 in 1984 to 170.87 km2 in 2014. Sparse vegetation equally increased in spatial extent by 25% given the variations registered from 6.86 km2 in 1984 to 97.16 km2 in 2014. The reduction in vegetation cover was found to have been replaced by increase in other land cover types—residential (18.97 km2) and industrial areas (39.87 km2). Suggesting that, heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of land resources, in addition to weak concerns towards preserving the accruing benefits of vegetation resources attracted anthropogenic phenomenon (e.g. urbanization) to vegetated areas. As such, strengthening institutional monitoring and urban planning frameworks would help to improve sustainable governance of the tropical rainforests.