A time series of Landsat Thematic mapper (TM)
and Enhance Thematic mapper plus (ETM+) of 1987, 1995
and 2006 were used to extract land use/land cover changes
of Kano metropolitan, north western Nigeria. A supervised
signature extraction with the maximum likelihood algorithm
was employed to detect the land use/land cover changes in
the study area. The analysis revealed a significant urban
expansion at the expense of cultivated and vegetated land
cover. Correlation analysis revealed a positive relationship
between water body and built-up areas and a negative
relationship between built-up areas and cultivated land use.
Two-way Analysis of variance (2-way ANOVA) conducted
on the mean score of land uses shows significant differences
(p < 0.05) in the selected land uses and period of study and
an interaction between the land uses. The study
demonstrated that the integration of satellite images and
remote sensing tools were very effective approaches for
analysing the spatial pattern of land use change.