The conversion rate of agricultural lands to urban areas in Oyi local government area, Anambra State Nigeria

Agricultural land in urban areas has a strategic role as a provider of food for the people living in the urban areas, as well as supporting the environment. The important role of the existence of agricultural land in urban areas over the past few decades faces a serious threat, namely the occurrence of agricultural land conversion. This study was carried out with the aim to analyze the trend of agricultural land conversion in urban areas and to find out which of the land use pattern is been affected. The data used in this research is the image classification using different land use classes which are settlement, farm land, forest, bare surface, using ArcGIS 10.4 software, which is dependent on the observable features. The results showed that there are positive changes of identified geographic features among the different classified image of the selected epochs. For the period of 2005 to 2015, it was observed that Settlement gained 1.44km² (5.73%) from other classes making it the only feature that actually increased within this epoch. Then for the period of 2015 to 2022, Bare surface gained about 5.24km² (20.85 %) of its area from other LULC classes, forest gained about 6.44km² (25.64%) of its area from other classes, Settlement gained about 15.09km² (60.09%) additional area from other classes in the study area. While the Negative changes for the period of 2005 to 2015, observed that from the classified images that Bare surface lost about 1.79km² (7.13%) of its area to land use land cover (LULC) classes, farm land lost about15.44km²(61.49%) of its area coverage, Forest lost about 9.31km² (37.08%) the total of its area to other classes in the study area. Between 2015 to 2023, it was observed that farm land was the only class that lost some of its area 1.65km² (6.58%) to other classes.