The investigation of the land use changes from forest to oil palm in Sabah

Abstract

The oil palm plantation has often been accused as the cause of global warming. The impact of oil palm expansion has been particularly severe in tropical forest regions and oil palm plantation is expected to increase continuously over the next 10 or 20 years. The aim of this study is to analyse the pattern of oil palm distribution and how it affects the temperature in Sabah from year 2000 to 2016. Landsat satellite image data were obtained from the USGS website of the available years between year 2000 to 2016. These data were mosaicked and classified by using ERDAS Imagine 2014 and the land use changes were compared. Next, the process was continued by comparing the land surface temperature using thermal band to detect the temperature of oil palm expansion. The results show the total percentage of land use changes to oil palm plantation in Sabah. Lastly, the result of graph analysis on the effect of temperature change caused by oil palm expansion was produced.