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Land use and cover change in Dar es Salaam metropolitan city: satellite data and CA-Markov chain analysis

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Abstract

Land use and land cover change is driven by a complex interaction involving multiple environmental, climatic, and social factors. This study employs time-series satellite imagery from Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (1995 and 2009) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (2022) to examine LULC changes in Tanzania's Dar es Salaam Metropolitan City. Image pre-processing was performed using the Google Earth engine code editor, followed by LULC classification using Random Forest machine learning in R software. Herein, seven LULC classes were defined: Built-up areas; agriculture; forest; bushland; water; grassland; and bare soil. The overall accuracy and Kappa coefficients for the years 1995 were 81.40% and 0.77, for 2009 were 88.42% and 0.86, and for 2022 were 81.51% and 0.77, respectively.. Results showed that between 1995 and 2022, the built-up and agricultural land areas increased by 14.87% and 4.47%, respectively. In contrast, there was a significant decrease in bushland, grassland, forest, and bare land areas (14.57%, 1.75%, 2.9%, and 35%), respectively. The study identifies factors influencing these changes and employs a Cellular-Automata-Markov-Chain (CA-Markov-Chain) model to evaluate and predict LULC changes. Distance from the city centre, population density, and precipitation are major drivers for LULC change. The CA-Markov Chain analysis predicts that the built-up area and agricultural area will grow from 319km2 (19.30%) to 530 km2 (32.06%) and 471 km2 (28.49%) to 720 km2 (43.56%) between 2022 and 2050 respectively, based on the trends observed from 1995 to 2022. Therefore, policymakers should prioritise sustainable urban planning in Dar es Salaam, considering drivers of land-use change and predicted growth in built-up and agricultural areas.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for providing the entire Landsat imagery and the Resilience Academy (https://resilienceacademy.ac.tz) for providing various baseline data.

Funding

The study received support from the RCMRD GMES and Africa Project Grant Scholarship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Resource Assessment, University of Dar es Salaam, P.O. Box 35097, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

    Olipa Simon & James Lyimo

  2. Department of Geography, University of Dar es Salaam, P.O. Box 35049, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

    Nestory Yamungu

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  1. Olipa Simon
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Correspondence to Olipa Simon.

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Simon, O., Lyimo, J. & Yamungu, N. Land use and cover change in Dar es Salaam metropolitan city: satellite data and CA-Markov chain analysis. GeoJournal 88, 6119–6136 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-023-10960-0

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