Impact of landscape dynamics and intensities on the ecological land of major cities in Ethiopia

Mekonnen Amberber Degefu,Sileshi Degefa,Gudina Legese Feyisa,Mekuria Argaw

doi:10.1186/s40068-021-00237-1

Mekonnen Amberber Degefu, Sileshi Degefa + Show 2 more

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40068-021-00237-1

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Abstract

BackgroundUnderstanding the dependence of ecological land and dynamics of the human-nature-coupled landscape is crucial for urban ecosystem resilience. In this study, we characterized and compared the Spatio-temporal responses of ecological land to urban landscape dynamics in Bahir Dar, Addis Ababa, Adama, and Hawassa cities in Ethiopia for the last three decades (1990–2020). Three sets of Landsat satellite images, field observations, and urban land indexes were used to produce landscape maps and geo-spatial data analysis.ResultsThe results showed that in all cities ecological land has had changed intensely during 1990–2020 regarding its quantity, and spatial pattern. Besides, the substantial expansion of built-up ecosystems was manifested at the cost of ecological land. The built-up ecosystem was augmented by 17,341.0 ha (32.16%), 2151.27 ha (19.64%), 2715.21 ha (12.21%), and 2599.65 ha (15.71%) for Addis Ababa, Adama, Bahir Dar, and Hawassa cities respectively from 1990 to 2020 periods. A total of 40.97% of the prolonged built-up area was obtained from urban agricultural land alone. Moreover, urban sprawl is likely to continue, which will be outweighed by the loss of the open space ecosystem. The finding also confirmed the value of land-use intensity (LUI) of Addis Ababa (3.31), Bahir Dar (3.56), Hawassa (4.82), Adama (5.04) was augmented parallel with accelerated growth in the built-up ecosystems. Besides, the Integrated land-use dynamics degree (ILUDD) analysis confirmed that the spatial pattern of ecological land loss significantly consistent with LUI in all cities.ConclusionLand-use intensity (LUI) dynamics pattern was followed by urban ecological land to the multi-complex human-dominance ecosystem with a substantial influence on urban greenery and ecosystem services provides. Thus, in all cities, the implementation of effective ecological land management and urban planning policies are required to ensure economic development and ecosystem resilience.

Highlights

Urbanization and associated a massive landscape change has led to a substantial change in the quantity of the composition, the structure, and the function of ecological land (Wangai et al 2019; Liu et al 2020a; Talukdar et al 2020) while, boosted the formation of human-dominated or human-nature-coupled ecosystems (Zhang et al 2013, 2018; Hu et al 2019; Chen et al 2021)
Land use land cover dynamics The Spatio-temporal land-use dynamics degree of each city with the corresponding percentage is illustrated in Tables 4, 5, 6, 7 and Fig. 3
This study showed that a substantial amount of ecological land was converted to build-up from 1990 to 2020, which was characterized by a net upsurge in building up and a large reduction of the urban forest, urban agriculture, and bare land ecosystem (Figs. 4 and 5)

Summary

Introduction

Urbanization and associated a massive landscape change has led to a substantial change in the quantity of the composition, the structure, and the function of ecological land (Wangai et al 2019; Liu et al 2020a; Talukdar et al 2020) while, boosted the formation of human-dominated or human-nature-coupled ecosystems (Zhang et al 2013, 2018; Hu et al 2019; Chen et al 2021). According to Ye et al (2018), globally the number of people living in cities is going up a fast rate from 0.75 billion (29.6%) in 1950 to 6.34 billion (66.7%) projected by 2050 and demand 1.2 million km cityscapes by 2030 (Seto et al 2012; Das and Das 2019) These urbanization scenarios and their inference to ecological land dynamics in rapidly developing cities and surrounding ecosystems are Degefu et al Environ Syst Res (2021) 10:32 becoming a common issue in policy discussions and scientific analysis (Ha et al 2020; Mekasha et al 2020). Three sets of Landsat satellite images, field observations, and urban land indexes were used to produce landscape maps and geo-spatial data analysis

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