ANNOUNCEMENTS
Wetland has been known as the major transition zone between the terrestrial and aquatic regions. As water on the soil or near the surface gets saturated seasonally or permanently over the year, geospatial technology based on remote sensing and Geographic information system can help in analyzing and investigating the loss or gain in the wetland natural resources for sustainable development. This project was designed to investigate the spatiotemporal variation of the wetland’s ecosystem along the major tributary of Upper Benue and River Gongola at Numan using multiple remote sensing techniques (Optical remote sensing, Microwave Remote sensing, and Advanced Spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer/Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Digital Elevation Model). This was achieved through 1) spatiotemporal inventory, modelling and depicting the wetland potential basins and ponds, 2) investigating the spatial multitemporal change of land-use land-cover dynamics in wetland ecosystem 3) computational analysis of major ponds areas from Sentinel 1 Synthetic Aperture Radar/ optical (Enhanced thematic mapper (ETM/ETM+)), 4) comparing multiple technologies of optical and microwave remote sensing technique with Advanced Spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer/Shuttle Radar Topography Mission DEM 5) publishing the major outputs on a web-based and mobile platform for easy assessment of the research findings. As three to six land surface area of the earth comprises of wetlands, the geospatial technique from multitemporal Landsat satellites images (Enhanced thematic mapper) and Microwave (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data covering the research area was acquired ranging from 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019. Field data was the primary data sources for this project, Global mapper 19, Google Earth Pro, ArcGIS 10.7, Erdas Imagine 2015 and SNAP Tool software were used for data analysis while Google earth engine and R were adopted for scripting and coding for the best output of the analysis such as the classification of a digital image, change detection, Time series, Accuracy Assessment and calculation of area and visualization of cartographic features. The result shows that the wetland areas were at an increasing rate from 1103.976 hectares (4%) 2003 to 1980.5058 hectares (7%) 2019 and it also conformed with the “Ramsar sites with International Importance” based on Criteria 1,2,3,4,6,7, and 8. The result also indicates that the wetlands A = 3.443m, B = 4.237m, and C = 5.169m figure 11/12 confirmed with the depth, not exciding 6-meter wetland criteria. Therefore, the project area can be included under the Ramsar sites of Nigeria.
Keywords: ASTER/SRTM DEM, Wetlands, Geospatial approach, Remote sensing, LU/LC dynamics.
