Abstract
The rapidly changing landuse/landcover at various scales mainly during the past recent decades have caused the degradation of biodiversity and this in turn has affected the human wellbeing in Ethiopia. However, adequate study is lacking particularly in Walmara district where intensive cereal based faming system is exerted by the rapidly increasing rural population growth. Hence, the aim of this study was to examine the spatiotemoral pattern of the landuse/landcover change that has taken place in 1985 and in 2017. For this, two Landsat images (30×30m resolution) were used to analyze temporal landuse/landcover changes with the application of Geographic information system (GIS) techniques and remote sensing (RS) using Quantum GIS (version: 2.18). Here, a supervised image classification technique was applied with Maximum likelihood classification algorism. With this analysis six main landuse/land cover types namely, cropland, grassland, forest land, settlement, wetland and water body were identified. In 1985 the areas of cropland (52816ha), grass land (16755ha), forest land (4633ha), wetland (1665ha), settlement (1124ha) and waterbody (125ha), while in 2017, the areas of cropland (64984ha), grass land (2442), forest land (4329ha), wetland (1404ha), settlement (3790ha) and waterbody (170ha). These results show that over the last thirty years, in the study district, the area covered by crops has increased by 15.8%, settlement area by 3.5% while, in contrast, the areas covered by grassland has shrunk by 18.6%, forest area by 0.4% in 2017. The major reasons for such rapid changes in landuse/landcover in the study are land exploration for agricultural purpose and built ups for settlement and small scale factories. Overall, the present finding suggest the essence of devising integrated landuse policy and plan to sustainably utilize the limited land and land resources and to reduce the impact of climate change that is occurring mainly due to the unwise use of these resources.
Highlights
Landuse/landcover change (LULCC) refers to the earth’s territorial surface modification by human activities [2]
Though Human beings have been modifying natural environments to obtain short term solution for their problems for several thousands of years, the rates, extents and intensities of human pressure on land is by far greater than ever before. Such dramatic rate of land use land cover change is affecting the status, properties and functions of ecosystems, which in turn affect the provision of ecosystem services and human well-being [7]
The study was carried out at Walmara district which is situated between the geographical coordinates 8°5 ́-9°51 ́N and 38°25 ́-38°45 ́E in Oromia national regional state, at about 40 km southwest of Addis Ababa city, central Ethiopia at about
Summary
Landuse/landcover change (LULCC) refers to the earth’s territorial surface modification by human activities [2]. Though Human beings have been modifying natural environments to obtain short term solution for their problems for several thousands of years, the rates, extents and intensities of human pressure on land is by far greater than ever before Such dramatic rate of land use land cover change is affecting the status, properties and functions of ecosystems, which in turn affect the provision of ecosystem services and human well-being [7]. Likewise of other countries in the world though LULCC is not a recent phenomenon in Ethiopia [12], it is exacerbated by the scale, speed and long-term nature of urbanization and modernization [16] These changes are mainly from natural vegetation land to agricultural land and non-vegetative land use in which settlement and degraded land uses are among. The highland areas in Ethiopia cover nearly 45% of the country’s
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