Assessment of Spatio-Temporal of the Oyimo Forest Reserve Degradation in Ondo State, Nigeria Towards the Development of Applicable Guidelines

Abstract

This work assessed the Spatio-Temporal of the Oyimo Forest Reserve Degradation in Ondo State, Nigeria towards the development of applicable guidelines. Forest degradation is a changing process that impacts the values of a forest, reducing its ability to provide products and services. Information derived from land use, land cover change and forest degradation is important to land conservation, sustainable development, and management of forest reserve. To identify land use, land cover changes and degradation; remote sensing data from satellite imagery and image processing techniques was done within three dates of 1998, 2011 and 2021 using Landsat images of 30 m resolution. ERDAS Imagine, IDRISI Selva, QGIS and ArcGIS software were used to classify, identify the changes and degraded area. The classification was done using five land cover classes (forest, settlement, water body, farmland and bare surface). Preprocessing and classification of the images were analyzed carefully and accuracy assessment was tested separately using the kappa coefficient. The results showed that Oyimo forest area was 35,257.22ha in 1998, 22,708.04ha in 2011 and 23, 903.2ha in 2021. Prediction analysis showed that if measures are not put in place in the forest reserves will be seriously degraded and if this happen there would be serious climate change as more carbon are releasing to the atmosphere. The highest carbon loss for this period was 27,660 tons, and the lowest carbon loss was 687 tons in year 2017 and 2003. Land area improved was 11, 978.02184, land area stable was 29,032.919, Land area degraded was 18,727.849 and land area with no data was 19.21016 the correlation between carbon emission and loss of forest is r² 0.8506 and organic carbon and loss of forest is r² 0.9959, which was highly correlated. It was concluded that there was degradation in the Oyimo forest reserve between 1998 and 2011, between 2011 and 2021 there was significant improvement in the forest. In order to address particular problems like carbon loss, habitat degradation, and soil productivity, as well as to propose pathways for improving forest quality, remote sensing and GIS can be used as space quantification tools for forest conservation.