Remote Sensing Based Analysis of the Latest Development and Structure of Abidjan District, Cote d’Ivoire

The purpose of this study is to analyze the land use/land cover dynamics change in relation to urban sprawl during 1990, 2002 and 2014 of Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast in West Africa and develop urban structure type (UST) classification using oriented based image analysis (OBIA) method of Abidjan, the capital of Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa. This was done by using the maximum likelihood classification algorithm and postclassification change detection procedure. The spatial-temporal land use/ land cover dynamics change in relation to urbanization sprawl was assessed based on a series of Landsat images for 1990, 2002 and 2014. Afterwards, Spot 5 image from 2013 was used for UST classification through process trees method. The results revealed urban area expansion as major land use change for the periods 1990-2014 and the overall accuracy and kappa of the classification averaged 97.5 % and 0.96 respectively for the three years. However, there was an important increase in urban area between 2002 and 2014 compared to 1990-2002. Also, The result of UST classification revealed a disproportion in all classes’ areas coverage with 2.97% of industrial area, 3.21% of public services, bare soil are of 2.03%, informal, medium and high level residences areas covered 0.28%, 7.83% and 3.2% respectively, and they were surrounded by 70.35% of vegetation area and 10.13% of water body with an overall accuracy estimated to be 62%.