_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ *Corresponding author: E-mail: onwuteaka.john@ust.edu.ng; British Journal of Applied Science & Technology 18(2): 1-15, 2016; Article no.BJAST.30023 ISSN: 2231-0843, NLM ID: 101664541 SCIENCEDOMAIN international www.sciencedomain.org Aspects of the Landuse and Landcover Change Dynamics of the Riparian Corridor of the New Calabar River, Nigeria John Onwuteaka 1* 1 Department of Applied and Environmental Biology, Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Author’s contribution The sole author designed, analyzed and interpreted and prepared the manuscript. Article Information DOI: 10.9734/BJAST/2016/30023 Editor(s): (1) Xu Jianhua, Department of Geography, East China Normal University, China. Reviewers: (1) Sanaullah Khan, University of Balochistan, Pakistan. (2) Ndoh Mbue Innocent, University of Douala, Cameroon. Complete Peer review History: http://www.sciencedomain.org/review-history/17143 Received 12 th October 2016 Accepted 19 th November 2016 Published 6 th December 2016 ABSTRACT Landsat 7 ETM Satellite imagery for 1987 and 2013 were used in a geographic information system to map and model changes in the Landuse and Landcover along the freshwater Riparian corridor of the New Calabar River. Percentage change in six Landuse-Landcover (LULC) features, namely Freshwater forest, Grassland, Barren-Sparse Vegetation, Scrub-Shrub, Agriculture and Urban/Builtup, were calculated from the differences between the pixels of the LULC in the imagery for 1987 and 2013. The pattern of changes along the buffer zones between 50 m and 500 m was a mixture of gains and losses in the LULC types. The freshwater forest declined between 0.6%-22%. In the Barren/Sparse vegetation category, there was a decline of between 9-16% but an increase of 323% was experienced at the 50 m buffer. The gains and losses were observed for the Grass category with 2-30% losses and 233% gain at the 50 meter buffer. Similar observations in the Scrub-Shrub category showed that losses were between 1.3-1.6% while a gain of 11% was observed at the 50 meter buffer. The Agriculture and Urban-Builtup maintained a significant increase across the buffer zones with values of 24-160% and 24-358% respectively. A grid based Riparian reach alteration zone modeling showed that high and extreme changes in LULC occurred mostly at the middle and lower reaches for Urban/Builtup (45%); Scrub-Shrub (34%); Barren/Sparse (40%). High and Extreme values in LULC extending to the Upper reaches were Original Research Article