Monitoring of Forest Resource Health in Akure Reserve, Ondo State Nigeria

Remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) over the years play great role when integrated in the right way to study changes taken place on the planet. Most times, these changes are natural and beyond human interaction but often times too, the changes are occasioned by human factor in the search for development and daily survival. In achieving this, the forest is made to suffer unnecessarily thereby reducing its health status through excessive forest resources depletion. This study focusses on the monitoring of forest resource health in Akure forest reserve between 1972 and 2013 using Landsat MSS of 11/11/1972, Landsat TM of 17/12/1986, Landsat ETM+ of 03/01/2002, and Landsat ETM+ of 02/02/2013 downloaded from USGS website. Minimum Mahalanobis distance supervised classification was used to categorize land use pattern in the study area while ILWIS 3.2 Academic GIS was deployed to perform NDVI image classification analysis with a precision of 0.01m to determine the health status of the forest reserve. The analysis revealed that the total annual rate of depletion for 41 years stood at 2.46% while forest health status diminished during the study period as NDVI value ranged between -0.04to +0.44 (1972) to -1.0to +1.0 in 2013. The study recommends that open areas which are not homogeneous forest (shrub/grass land) detected in this study should be re-planted with varieties of tree species without delay to allow carbon sequestration for overall human benefits.