scholarly journals A Review on Land Use and Land Cover Change in Ethiopian Basins

Author(s):  
Motuma Shiferaw Regasa ◽  
Michael Nones

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes analysis is one of the most useful methodologies to understand how the land was used in the past years, what types of detections are to be expected in the future, as well as the driving forces and processes behind these changes. In Ethiopia, the rapidly changing of LULC is mainly due to population pressure, resettlement programs, climate change, and other human and nature-induced driving forces. Anthropogenic activities are the most significant factors adversely changing the natural status of the landscape and resources, which exerts unfavourable and adverse impacts on the environment and livelihood. The main goal of the present work is to review previous studies, discussing the spatio-temporal LULC changes in Ethiopian basins, to find out common points and gaps that exist in the current literature, to be eventually addressed in the future. Seventeen articles, published from 2011 to 2020, were selected and reviewed, focusing on LULC classification using ArcGIS and ERDAS imagine software by unsupervised and maximum likelihood supervised classification methods. Key informant interview (KII), focal group discussions (FGDs) and collection of ground truth data using ground positioning systems (GPS) for data validation were the major approaches discussed in most of the studies. All the analysed research showed that, during the last decades, Ethiopian lands changed to agricultural land use, waterbody, commercial farmland and built-up/settlement. Some parts of forest land, grazing land, swamp/wetland, shrubland, rangeland and bare/ rock out cropland cover class were changed to other LULC class types, mainly as a consequence of increasing anthropogenic pressure. In summary, these articles confirmed that LULC changes are a direct result of both natural and human influences. However, most of the study provided details of LULC for the past decades within a specific spatial location, while they did not address the challenge of forecasting future LULC changes at the basin scale.

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 585
Author(s):  
Motuma Shiferaw Regasa ◽  
Michael Nones ◽  
Dereje Adeba

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes analysis is one of the most useful methodologies to understand how the land was used in the past years, what types of detections are to be expected in the future, as well as the driving forces and processes behind these changes. In Ethiopia, Africa, the rapid variations of LULC observed in the last decades are mainly due to population pressure, resettlement programs, climate change, and other human- and nature-induced driving forces. Anthropogenic activities are the most significant factors adversely changing the natural status of the landscape and resources, which exerts unfavourable and adverse impacts on the environment and livelihood. The main goal of the present work is to review previous studies, discussing the spatiotemporal LULC changes in Ethiopian basins, to find out common points and gaps that exist in the current literature, to be eventually addressed in the future. A total of 25 articles, published from 2011 to 2020, were selected and reviewed, focusing on LULC classification using ArcGIS and ERDAS imagine software by unsupervised and maximum likelihood supervised classification methods. Key informant interview, focal group discussions, and collection of ground truth information using ground positioning systems for data validation were the major approaches applied in most of the studies. All the analysed research showed that, during the last decades, Ethiopian lands changed from natural to agricultural land use, waterbody, commercial farmland, and built-up/settlement. Some parts of forest land, grazing land, swamp/wetland, shrubland, rangeland, and bare/ rock out cropland cover class changed to other LULC class types, mainly as a consequence of the increasing anthropogenic pressure. In summary, these articles confirmed that LULC changes are a direct result of both natural and human influences, with anthropogenic pressure due to globalisation as the main driver. However, most of the studies provided details of LULC for the past decades within a specific spatial location, while they did not address the challenge of forecasting future LULC changes at the watershed scale, therefore reducing the opportunity to develop adequate basin-wide management strategies for the next years.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 798
Author(s):  
Thi-Thu Vu ◽  
Yuan Shen

Land-use and land-cover (LULC) change analyses are useful in understanding the changes in our living environments and their driving factors. Modeling changes of LULC in the future, together with the driving factors derived through analyzing the trends of past LULC changes, bring the opportunity to assess and orientate the current and future land-use policies. As the entryway of Quang Ninh province, Vietnam, Dong Trieu locale has experienced significant LULC changes during the past two decades. In this study, the spatial distribution of six Level I LULC classes, forest, cropland, orchards, waterbody, built-up, and barren land, in Dong Trieu district at 2000, 2010, and 2019 were obtained from Landsat imageries by maximum likelihood technique. The most significant changes observed over the past twenty years are a decrease of barren land (9.1%) and increases of built-up (8.1%) and orchards (6.8%). Driving factor analysis indicated that the changes of cropland and built-up were dependent on distance from road (DFR), distance from main road (DFMR), distance from urban (DFU), distance from water (DFW), elevation, slope, and population density. The changes of forest were dependent on all the driving forces listed above, except DFMR. The orchards mainly appeared near the high-population-density area. The transformation of the waterbody was affected by geography (elevation and slope) and population density. The higher the population density, the less barren the land would appear.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bidroha Basu ◽  
Arunima Sarkar Basu ◽  
Srikanta Sannigrahi ◽  
Francesco Pilla

<p>Over the past few decades, there has been over increasing pressure on land due to population growth, urbanization, agriculture expansion and industrialization. The change in land use and land cover (LULC) pattern are highly dependent on human intervention. Deforestation pattern has started due to growth of suburbs, cities, and industrial land. The alarming rate in change of LULC pattern was on a rising trend since 1990s and has been increasing over time. This study focuses on analyzing the changes in LULC pattern in Dublin, Ireland over the past two decades using remotely sensed LANDSAT satellite imagery data, and quantify the effect of LULC change in streamflow simulation in watershed at Dublin by using rainfall-runoff model. Benefit of using remotely sensed image to investigate LULC changes include availability of high-resolution spatial data at free of cost, images captured at high temporal resolution to monitor the changes in LULC during both seasonal and yearly timescale and readily availability of data. The potential classification of landforms has been done by performing both supervised as well as unsupervised classification. The results obtained from the classified images have been compared to google earth images to understand the accuracy of the image classification. The change in LULC can be characterized by changes in building density and urban/artificial area (build up areas increase due to population growth), changes in vegetation area as well as vegetation health, changes in waterbodies and barren land. Furthermore, a set of indices such as vegetation index, building index, water index and drought index were estimated, and their changes were monitored over time. Results of this analysis can be used to understand the driving factors affecting the changes in LULC and to develop mathematical models to predict future changes in landforms. Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) based rainfall-runoff model were used to simulate the changes in runoff due to the LULC changes in watershed over two decades. The developed framework is highly replicable because of the used LANDSAT data and can be applied to generate essential information for conservation and management of green/forest lands, as well as changes in water availability and water stress in the assessed area.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Jose Gaillard ◽  
Andria Dawson ◽  
Ralph Fyfe ◽  
Esther Githumbi ◽  
Emily Hammer ◽  
...  

<p>The question of whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover (i.e. anthropogenic land cover change due to land use, LULC) were sufficiently large to have a major impact on regional cli-mates is still a matter of debate. Climate model simulations have shown that LULC datasets can have large regional impacts on climate in recent and prehistoric time<sup> (1)</sup>. But there are major differences between the available LULC scenarios/datasets such as HYDE (History Database of the Global En-vironment) and Kaplan’s KK10 <sup>(2)</sup>, and diagnoses of inferred carbon-cycle impacts show that none of the scenarios are realistic <sup>(3)</sup>. The only way to provide a useful assessment of the potential for LULC changes to affect climate in the past, is to provide more realistic LULC data based on palaeovegetation and archaeological evidence to improve the LULC datasets used in climate modelling<sup>(4)</sup>. We use the REVEALS model to reconstruct LC from pollen data at a regional scale, and archaeological data to map LU types and distribution, and estimate per capita LU. The archaeology-based LU maps and per-capita LU estimates are used to improve LULC datasets. Pollen-based REVEALS LC estimates are then used to evaluate/validate the new, improved LULC datasets. These new datasets will be used to implement past land use in palaeoclimate and carbon cycle model simulations. Such simulations are necessary to assess the impact of LULC changes in the past and understand the effect of ecosys-tem management on future climate. We present results from five years of PAGES LandCover6k activities. </p><p>(1) Strandberg G, Kjellström E, Poska A, Wagner S, Gaillard M-J et al. (2014) Regional climate model sim-ulations for Europe at 6 and 0.2 k BP: sensitivity to changes in anthropogenic deforestation. Clim. Past 10, 661–680.<br>(2) Gaillard M-J, Sugita S, Mazier F et al (2010) Holocene land-cover reconstructions for studies on land cover-climate feedbacks. Clim. Past 6, 483-499.<br>(3) Stocker B, Yud Z, Massae C, Joos F (2017) Holocene peatland and ice-core data constraints on the tim-ing and magnitude of CO2 emissions from past land use. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/ pnas.1613889114.<br>(4) Harrison S P, Gaillard M-J, Stocker B D, Vander Linden M, Klein Goldewijk K, Boles O, Braconnot P, Dawson A, Fluet-Chouinard E, Kaplan J O, Kastner T, Pausata F S R, Robinson E, Whitehouse N J, Madella M, and Morrison K D (2019) Development and testing of scenarios for implementing Holocene LULC in Earth Sys-tem Model Experiments, Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2019-125, in review, 2019.</p><p><sup> </sup></p><p> </p><p> </p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 5174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Botlhe Matlhodi ◽  
Piet K. Kenabatho ◽  
Bhagabat P. Parida ◽  
Joyce G. Maphanyane

Land use land cover (LULC) change is one of the major driving forces of global environmental change in many developing countries. In this study, LULC changes were evaluated in the Gaborone dam catchment in Botswana between 1984 and 2015. The catchment is a major source of water supply to Gaborone city and its surrounding areas. The study employed Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) using Landsat imagery of 1984, 1995, 2005 and 2015. Image classification for each of these imageries was done through supervised classification using the Maximum Likelihood Classifier. Six major LULC categories, cropland, bare land, shrub land, built-up area, tree savanna and water bodies, were identified in the catchment. It was observed that shrub land and tree savanna were the major LULC categories between 1984 and 2005 while shrub land and cropland dominated the catchment area in 2015. The rates of change were generally faster in the 1995–2005 and 2005–2015 periods. For these periods, built-up areas increased by 59.8 km2 (108.3%) and 113.2 km2 (98.5%), respectively, while bare land increased by 50.3 km2 (161.1%) and 99.1 km2 (121.5%). However, in the overall period between 1984 and 2015, significant losses were observed for shrub land, 763 km2 (29.4%) and tree savanna, 674 km2 (71.3%). The results suggest the need to closely monitor LULC changes at a catchment scale to facilitate water resource management and to maintain a sustainable environment.


Author(s):  
H. T. T. Nguyen ◽  
T. A. Pham ◽  
M. T. Doan ◽  
P. T. X. Tran

Abstract. This paper aims to predict the trend of land use land cover (LULC) changes in Dak Nong province over time. Data from Landsat images captured in 2009, 2015, and 2018 was employed to analyze and predict the spatial distributions of LULC categories. The Random Forest (RF) was adopted to classify the images into ten different LULC classes. Besides, integration of Multi-Layer Perceptron Markov Neural Network (MLP-NN) with Markov Chain (MC) was applied to predict the future LULC changes in the region based on the change detection over the previous years. For all classified images, overall accuracy (OA) ranged from 77.35% to 84.55% with kappa (K) coefficient index ranging from 0.75 to 0.8. The results revealed that the annual population growth together with social-economic development was regarded as major drives for land conversion in the area. The predicted map showed a significant decrease trend inthe forest classes by 2025, accounting for 23 thousand ha. However, residential areas, rubber, and agricultural land classes are predicted to rise to 460 ha, 3,000 ha, and 20,000 ha, respectively. The simulated model and calibrated area data may be a vital contribution to sustainable development efforts of the local based on the dynamics of LULC and future LULC change scenarios. Overall, ascertaining the complex interface related to changes in land use and its major drivers over time provides useful information predict to explore the future trend of LULC changes, establish alternative land-use schemes and serve as guidelines for urban planning policymakers.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongwei Yuan ◽  
Tao Zhao ◽  
Weimin Wang ◽  
Shaohui Chen ◽  
Feng Wu

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is an important part of the global environmental change. This study predicted the future structure of land use/cover on the basis of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) and an econometric model with the socioeconomic factors as the driving forces. The future spatial pattern of land use/cover in China was simulated with the Dynamics of Land System (DLS) under the Business as Usual scenario, Rapid Economic Growth scenario and Cooperate Environmental Sustainability scenario. The simulation results showed that the land use/land cover in China will change continually due to the human activities and climate change, and the spatial pattern of land use/cover will also change as time goes by. Besides, the spatial pattern of land cover in China under the three scenarios is consistent on the whole, but with some regional differences. Built-up area will increase rapidly under the three scenarios, while most land cover types will show a decreasing trend to different degrees under different scenarios. The simulation results can provide an underlying land surface data and reference to the methodology research on the prediction of LUCC.


Water ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 184
Author(s):  
Jamila Ngondo ◽  
Joseph Mango ◽  
Joel Nobert ◽  
Alfonse Dubi ◽  
Xiang Li ◽  
...  

The evaluation of the hydrological responses of river basins to land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes is crucial for sustaining water resources. We assessed the impact of LULC changes (1990–2018) on three hydrological components (water yield (WYLD), evapotranspiration (ET), and sediment yield (SYLD)) of the Wami–Ruvu Basin (WRB) in Tanzania, using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The 1990 LULC imagery was used for SWAT simulation, and imagery from 2000, 2010, and 2018 was used for comparison with modelled hydrological parameters. The model was calibrated (1993–2008) and validated (2009–2018) in the SWAT-CUP after allowing three years (1990–1992) for the warm-up period. The results showed a decrease in WYLD (3.11 mm) and an increase in ET (29.71 mm) and SYLD (from 0.12 t/h to 1.5 t/h). The impact of LULC changes on WYLD, ET, and SYLD showed that the increase in agriculture and built-up areas and bushland, and the contraction of forest led to the hydrological instability of the WRB. These results were further assessed with climatic factors, which revealed a decrease in precipitation and an increase in temperature by 1°C. This situation seems to look more adverse in the future, based on the LULC of the year 2036 as predicted by the CA–Markov model. Our study calls for urgent intervention by re-planning LULC and re-assessing hydrological changes timely.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aman Srivastava ◽  
Pennan Chinnasamy

AbstractThe present study, for the first time, examined land-use land cover (LULC), changes using GIS, between 2000 and 2018 for the IIT Bombay campus, India. Objective was to evaluate hydro-ecological balance inside campus by determining spatio-temporal disparity between hydrological parameters (rainfall-runoff processes), ecological components (forest, vegetation, lake, barren land), and anthropogenic stressors (urbanization and encroachments). High-resolution satellite imageries were generated for the campus using Google Earth Pro, by manual supervised classification method. Rainfall patterns were studied using secondary data sources, and surface runoff was estimated using SCS-CN method. Additionally, reconnaissance surveys, ground-truthing, and qualitative investigations were conducted to validate LULC changes and hydro-ecological stability. LULC of 2018 showed forest, having an area cover of 52%, as the most dominating land use followed by built-up (43%). Results indicated that the area under built-up increased by 40% and playground by 7%. Despite rapid construction activities, forest cover and Powai lake remained unaffected. This anomaly was attributed to the drastically declining barren land area (up to ~ 98%) encompassing additional construction activities. Sustainability of the campus was demonstrated with appropriate measures undertaken to mitigate negative consequences of unwarranted floods owing to the rise of 6% in the forest cover and a decline of 21% in water hyacinth cover over Powai lake. Due to this, surface runoff (~ 61% of the rainfall) was observed approximately consistent and being managed appropriately despite major alterations in the LULC. Study concluded that systematic campus design with effective implementation of green initiatives can maintain a hydro-ecological balance without distressing the environmental services.


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