The growing incidence of global environmental decline, especially the depletion of ozone layer, loss of biodiversity
and degradation of large watersheds caused by deforestation, have attracted the attention of decision makers
worldwide for quite sometime. After a series of global environmental conferences between 1987 through 1992,
policy debates within the field of environmental protection identified the conditions of watersheds as a vital
component of ecosystem health. While human impact on the environment has intensified, considerable attention has
been directed towards the search for a means to preserve existing biodiversity and management of large watersheds.
In the process the question of the watershed management in a tropical ecosystem continues to draw substantial
interests from researchers. Increasingly, in the past decade, Nigeria’s River Niger Delta has been under intense
pressure because of the threat posed by multiple factors. Human activities inland have exerted a lot of pressure
through intense use of land surrounding the watershed for oil and gas drilling, agriculture, logging, and fuelwood
extraction and increasing reliance on the river for electricity consumption to satisfy both domestic and foreign
exchange needs. Compounding the problems are the lack of efficient, inventorying and precise data to sustainably
manage the watershed. Notwithstanding the gravity of these trends there has not been any major effort by resource
managers aimed at examining these issues in watershed management within the Niger Delta Region of Southern
Nigeria. This calls for the need to find appropriate tools to aid the management of the river. Perhaps the most
important element in the efforts to manage the Niger Delta is the need to provide a baseline data about the ecology
and forest cover to form the basis of future management. This study therefore adopts a remote sensing technique to
provide baseline information about the surrounding ecology of River Niger Delta to facilitate future monitoring.