Geospatial Analysis of Land Cover Change and Urban Sprawl Trend in Akure Region, Nigeria

Urban sprawl was conceptualized by Glaeser and Kahn [1] as unplanned expansion of urban areas which is characterized by low density physical development and non-existence of basic municipal infrastructure usually beyond urban fringes. Some early urban development researchers like Alonso [2], Mill [3] and Muth [4] attributed the emergence of sprawl to ‘mono-centric city model’, which suggests spatial structure of urban areas resulted from the tradeoff between the rent of land and cost of commuting. The low cost-center coupled with relatively low rent at the peripheries of cities in many developing countries facilitates the growth of periurban areas. Land use and land cover (LULC) change, on the other hand, is urbanization induced which has led to dramatic changes in land use practices [5]. Rapid pace of urbanization is believed to be a global problem present in most of the developing countries of the world. Balogun et al. [6] opined that urban populations in developing countries have grown by 40% between 1900 and 1975. According to them, the trend will continue adding approximately 2 billion people to the urban population of the presently lessdeveloped nations for the next 30 years. In similar way, Arnfield [7] observed that the world is becoming increasingly urbanized with 45% of the population already living in the urban areas in the year 2000. With the projection as at then, half of the world will live in urban areas by 2007. It was also estimated that by the year 2025, 60% of the world’s population will live in cities (UNPF, 1999). Akure is not in any way going contrary to this prediction as the population has been more than triple of what it used to be before it became administrative headquarters of the state and local governments. Generally, land cover is often altered principally by direct human use like agriculture and livestock raising, forest harvesting and management, urban and sub-urban construction and development. Hardly can we find any vegetation that has not been affected or altered by man in the world [813]. In this regard, about 400,000 hectares of vegetation cover are confirmed to be lost annually [14,6]. Due to anthropogenic activities, the earth surface is being significantly altered by man’s presence and several activities on earth. According to Fasal [15] land transformation has been asserted to be one of the most important fields of human induced environmental transformation. Environmental protection is facing critical challenges due to several factors like increasing population, depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution, unplanned land use and several others. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to examine changes that have taken place in Akure urban land cover in the past three decades with a view of generating a predictive model for managing the future trend and combating its possible effects.