Long-Term Geomorphological and Ecological Responses of the Niger Delta to Oil Industry Activity: A Multi-Decadal Environmental Engineering Assessment

This dissertation conducts a comprehensive multi-decadal environmental engineering assessment of geomorphological and ecological responses of the Niger Delta to oil industry activity, developing an original trajectory analysis framework that integrates remote sensing, sedimentological, hydrological, and ecological data streams to reconstruct the cumulative environmental transformation of the delta system since the onset of large-scale oil production in the 1960s. The Niger Delta is one of the world's most complex and heavily impacted deltaic systems, and the long-term cumulative effect of oil infrastructure construction, oil spills, gas flaring, and dredging on the delta's geomorphological processes and ecological integrity has not been synthesised in a rigorous multi-disciplinary framework. The theoretical contribution is an Environmental Trajectory Analysis Framework that applies a coupled geomorphological-ecological change model to the Niger Delta, integrating geomorphological process representations of channel migration, sediment budget change, and coastal erosion with ecological succession models calibrated to mangrove, freshwater swamp forest, and estuarine habitat types. Multi-temporal satellite imagery analysis spanning 1972 to 2023 provides the landscape change inputs, supplemented by field-verified ground truth datasets. Hydrological records, oil spill incident database analysis, and published ecological survey datasets from 1970 to 2023 are integrated into the framework. The dissertation makes original contributions to delta geomorphology science by documenting for the first time the full multi-decadal channel network change attributable to infrastructure and dredging effects, and to delta ecology by quantifying long-term biodiversity trajectory divergence between oil-impacted and relatively unimpacted delta areas. Keywords: Niger Delta, geomorphological change, ecological trajectory, oil industry impacts, remote sensing.