ASSESSMENT OF URBAN SPRAWL AND AGRICULTURAL LAND IN MUSANZE CITY USING REMOTE SENSING AND GIS TECHNOLOGIES

Abstract

Musanze District is among the districts with high potentiality of agricultural productivities. However this District is facing the problem of decrease of agricultural land due to the urban population growth and development of sprawl which put pressure on agricultural land within the urban city boundaries and urban fringe area. In this research, satellite images of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) 2003 and Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) 2016 have been used to study the urban sprawl and to assess the impact of urban sprawl on agricultural land in Musanze City in Musanze District. Maximum likelihood supervised classification and post classification change detection techniques were applied for monitoring the urban sprawl in this study area. The ground truth data were collected by using GPS (Global Positioning System) for image classification and overall accuracy assessment of the classification results. Other different data were used to perform this study such as administrative entities shapefiles, google images and Digital elevation Model (DEM). From 2003 to 2016 there was significate conversion of agricultural land into urban land where area for urban area was increased from 475 Ha to 865 Ha ( increase of 7.09% in 13 years) while the agriculture land decreased from 4900 Ha to 4352 Ha ( decrease of 9.96% in 13 years). Meanwhile forest area increased between the study periods from 2.27 % to 5.15 % of the study area.