Department of Nursing, Shehu Suleh College of Nursing and Midwifery, Damaturu

Abstract

Desertification is a phenomena arising from disappearance of large body of water and high activities of dry sand which further aggravated by destruction of arable and soil fertility through three felling for energy, bush burning and overgrazing by herdsmen etc. It is one of the most serious environmental and socio economic problems facing northern part of Yobe state therefore there is need to study and determine the rate of expansion/encroachment so as to provide the decision makers a basic tool to minimize the effect of the menace. This research examines the use of GIS and remote sensing to detect the changes that has taken place between the years 2005 to 2014. In achieving this, 30m resolution satellite imagery of landsat 7 ETM+ for the year 2005 and 2009 and also Landsat 8 (orthorectified) for the year 2014 was acquired, preprocessed, processed and later discussed based on the derived necessary information. The classified image was tested and the accuracy assessment was 89.93%. However, kappa K^ was also used to test the agreement of the data and was found to be 0.8782 which is within the allowable tolerance. The result obtained reveals that; there is an increase in bare surface, Sand dune and water by 10%, 10% and 15% respectively. So also a decrease in Vegetation, Tree plantation and Wet land by 15%, 5% and 6% respectively which shows clearly that desertification has occurred. The research recommends the tree planting in the study area in order to regain the natural vegetation.