HABITAT SUITABILITY ANALYSIS FOR RED-BILLED QUELEA (QUELEA QUELEA) USING ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS (AHP) AND GEOSPATIAL TECHNIQUES IN HADEJIA-NGURU WETLANDS AREA OF NORTH -EAST NIGERIA, IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGEMENT.

Abstract

In this study Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and overlay weight analysis in ArcGIS software were used to generate the Red-billed Quelea sustainability maps for the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands area in Northern Nigeria. A total of nine factors that contribute to the species Habitat suitability namely: - Land use land cover, Type of vegetation, Height of vegetation, size of colony, status of colony, vegetation density, estimated population, stage of crop growth and water depth and accessibility were integrated in GIS environment and AHP was applied to rate the individual classes of each factor and weight the impact of one factor against the other to determine the weighted contribution or importance to the species habitat suitability. Basically, all the nine factors for wildlife suitability were converted into raster and combine by using weight overlays in ArcMap with weights from the AHP which are based on the distribution of each class of habitat factors to generate the final thematic map for Red-billed Quelea habitat suitability map. The data used were sentinel 2 image of 2017 of the study area, Google earth and GPS point locations. As usual running habitat suitability model requires estimation of weights by expertise for each individual criterion on GIS software. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) was used to classify the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands and its environments into classes from highly suitable habitat, moderately suitable, less suitable to not suitable habitat for the Red-billed Quelea species. It was shown that 13.90 % of the study area covers highly suitable area with an area coverage of 13816.3 hectares, about 23.68 % comprises of moderately suitable area with an area coverage of 23531.5 hectares, about 36.52 % of the study area covers less suitable habitat with an area coverage of 36296.3 Hectares and 25.88 % of the area covers not suitable habitat with an area coverage of 25725.4 hectares. The study highlights the potentiality of remote sensing, GIS and AHP in habitat suitability evaluation with minimal efforts and financial budget.