Land Use Change Detection and Evaluation in a Watershed: The Implications for Ofu River Water Quality in Anyigba, Kogi State, Nigeria

This paper examined visible land use changes in Ofu River watershed. Supervised and unsupervised classification of land use types were adopted. Geographical Information System (GIS) software, ArcGIS was used handling and analyzing geographic information by visualizing land use change characteristics or spatio-temporal variability of land use in the study area. The results shows built-up in 2000, 2010, 2020, and 2030 projection were analyzed to be (18.931km2, 30.891km2, 81.280km2 and 112.455km2) respectively, water body (7.491km2, 7.491km2, 7.450km2 and 7.428km2), wetlands (105.637km2, 81.713km2, 61.590km2 and 39.564k2), scattered agriculture (1381.057km2, 1,460.415km2, 1,58.560km2 and 1,662.313km2) and vegetated land (415.428km2, 348.033km2, 209.660km2 and 106.783km2) respectively. Tested hypothesis revealed that p< .05. This study recommends proper monitoring of land uses and workable land use policies be put in place in the study area.