Zeitschrift für Fernerkundung und GIS

Abstrakt

Geospatial Technologies Based Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics Characterization in the Central Rift Valley, Ethiopia

Esubalew Nebebe, Shimeles Damene, Ephrem Gebremariam

Land use land cover change is a major issue in the global environmental change, particularly in developing countries. Ethiopia is one of the Sub-Saharan African countries where such practices have been very common compromising the environmental health. Particularly, in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia, in the last decades there has been unprecedented change in land use land cover. The study aimed at analyzing the land use and land cover dynamics, in the Central Rift Valley, Zeway Dugda and Dodota districts, Ethiopia. The analysis covered three-decade (1984- 2013) datasets of Multispectral Scanner System (MSS), Thematic Mapper (TM), and Enhanced Thematic mapper (ETM+) for the year, 1984, 1995, and 2013 respectively. The databases were obtained from United States Geological Survey (USGS), Center for Earth Observation Resources Science (EROS) available free of charge from http://glovis.usgs.gov/ and the Ethiopian Geospatial Information Institute. Geographical Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technologies were used to classify the images analyze the magnitude, and trend of land use land cover (LULC) dynamics over the study period. An object-oriented supervised classification method and a post-classification change detection technique were applied for categorizing the changes into a definite land use land cover class. The analysis revealed six LULC types, where farmlands and built-up areas have shown continuous progressive expansion at the expenses of barelands and forestlands. Farmlands and built-up areas in 1984 expanded from 33.3%and 2.6% to 40.6% and 8.2% in 2013, while forestlands and barelands coverage in 1984 dwindled from 11.7%, 17.7%, to 4.2% and 10.1% in the year 2013 respectively. Comparatively, shrublands and waterbodies were also slightly augmented by 1.9% and 0.2% from 1984 to 2013. In a nutshell, the study realized that there has been a considerable land use land cover change occurred in the course of the study period in the study area.