Monitoring the dynamics of land cover in the Lake Kivu region using multi-temporal Landsat imagery

The objective of this paper is to access land cover change patterns in the Lake Kivu region located in Central Africa using historical multispectral Landsat imagery over past 25 years. A supervised or knowledge based characterization method was developed to quantify the land cover in the region by compositing multi-year Landsat imagery for three periods 1987, 2001 and 2010. Pixel based post classification method was used to access the land cover change pattern over the years. The region underwent rapid deforestation with 168,601 hectares of forest and 220,541 hectares of woodlands being cleared over the years. The areas were converted to farmlands for subsistence farming. Urbanization is increasing slowly over the years and mining and armed conflicts remain major challenge for forest protection in the region.