Assessment of Spatio-Temporal Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics in Ogoniland, Rivers State, Nigeria

Ogoniland, in Nigeria's Niger Delta, has experienced more than six decades of oil exploration, environmental pollution, and population pressure, yet its landscape change remains poorly quantified at the local scale. This study examined the spatio-temporal dynamics of land use and land cover (LULC) in Ogoniland between 1990 and 2025 using multi-temporal Landsat imagery acquired at five-year intervals. Images were classified into six classes (built-up, cropland, grassland, forest, mangrove, and water body) using the Random Forest algorithm, and vegetation condition was assessed with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in Google Earth Engine. Overall classification accuracy ranged from 84.2% to 88.6%, with Kappa coefficients of 0.825–0.868.