ASSESSMENT OF LAND USE/LAND COVER CHANGE MAPPING IN BANGUI CITY USING REMOTE SENSING AND GIS TECHNIQUES

Abstract. The security instability in the Central African Republic (CAR) forces the civilian population to flee the provinces to seek refuge in Bangui city, or in other countries. Human activity, which is very beneficial in the context of urbanization, is the main driving force of change in the city of Bangui, but also has a negative effect on the geoenvironment. Multispectral images data Landsat TM5, Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat-8 OLI of the years 1986, 2003 and 2020 was used to investigate Land use land cover (LULC) change of the city of Bangui. Maximum Likelihood (ML) classification algorithm was used to produce the map land use/land cover change detection in the study area. In Bangui city, four major classes have been identified, including vegetation, built-up, bare soil / rock and water. The analyses of the classified maps showed that Bangui city has been changed between 1986 and 2020, exceedingly area increased for built up (145.81%), vegetation (5.59%) and water (3.46%), it has however decreased for bare soil/ rock (40.60%). The overall accuracies and overall Kappa statistics achieved were 92.5%, 82.5% and 87.5%, and 0.90, 0.87 and 0.83 for 1986, 1999 and 2018 images, respectively.