Impact of Land Use Changes on Agricultural Land Use: Evidence from Jalingo Region of Taraba State, Nigeria

This study examined the integration of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (RS/GIS) for analyzing land use in Jalingo Region, Taraba State for the period 1996 to 2016; the image of 1996, 2006 and 2016 was used. The study employed a supervised digital image classification method using Arc GIS 10.3 software and classified the land use into residential, agricultural, commercial and transport. The images were made to pass through the processes of georeferencing, image enhancement, image resampling and classification and also descriptive statistics was adopted to analyze the findings on the effect of Urbanization on agricultural land use. Data for the study was the image of Jalingo Region of 1996, 2006 and 2016; also data was collected primarily by the administration of the questionnaire, and a total of 289 well-structured questionnaires were administered. Result show there was a significant loss of agricultural land from 180.46 km2 to 135.66 km2. It also revealed an increase of residential land use from 10.30% area coverage in 1996 to 28.07% in 2016, commercial land use increased from 0.20% area coverage in 1996 to 2.60% and transport increased from 0.39% to 2.84% in the same study period, with an annual rate of change of 7.82%, 35.81% and 46.95% respectively. This study shows that agricultural land use pattern has been greatly affected by transport, residential and commercial land uses. These results could help city planners and policymakers to attain and sustain future urban development. It is therefore recommended that government should encourage the people to expand and build towards the outskirts of cities, like Joroyinu, Lankaviri, etc through the provision of incentives and forces of attraction that is available at the city center in these areas to avoid the problem of overcrowdings.