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Land degradation is a series problem in Ethiopia highlands, particular in abbay basin reflected in the form of soil erosion and soil fertility decline from time to time. Beshilo catchment is one of the Abbay basin tributary, which covers 5,700 km2; this shows that the problem of the catchment is significant effect in Abbay basin development. In this study the impact of Land use/ Land cover change on annual outflow contribution of Beshilo Catchment is evaluated, distributed physically based hydrological model known as soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) model was used this study. Changes were analyzed and characterized impacts on surface runoff were evaluated. The model was calibrated and validated over the gauged upper reaches of catchments of Gummara River. The model was calibrated for the period from 1999–2008 and validated for the period from 2009–2014. The performance of the model was evaluated on the basis of performance rating criteria, coefficient of determination, Nash & Sutcliff efficiency. The overall performance of the models gives good result. For this study the land use land cover change scenario, were developed using its change. From the land cover change analysis results it was found that there has been a substantial decline of forest lands, shrub lands, grass lands and expansion of agricultural land. The SWAT modeling shows the result indicated that the mean annual stream flow were increase by 7.4% with 2004 LULC from 1996 LULC and increased by 6.8% with 2013 LULC from 1996 LULC.

Land use land cover change has an impact on hydrology of the watershed on the Robigumero watershed. The study mainly focused on estimating land use change and stream flow under different land use land cover changes of the Robigumero watershed. Land use land cove maps of 1996, 2006 and 2016 were collected from Ethiopian water irrigation and energy office. The soil and water assessment tool model (SWAT) was used to simulate LULC effects on the streamflow of Robigumero Watershed. The SWAT model performance was evaluated through sensitivity analysis, calibration, and validation. During the study period the land use land cover has changed due to growth in population of the study area. The Agricultural land increased by 22.4% and while grass land & forestland decreased by 17.5 and 5.3% Respectively in the year between 1996 to 2016. The findings of the stream flow simulation were used to assess the seasonal variability in stream flow caused by changes in land use and land cover. Both the calibration and validation result shows very good agreement between observed and simulated stream flow with NSE values of 0.81 and R2 values of 0.83 for calibration and NSE Values of 0.86 and R2 values of 0.87 for validation. The result of this study indicated that mean monthly stream flow were increased by 44.1m3/s for wet season and decreased by 2.3m3/s in dry season over 21 years’ period. In general redaction of agricultural land and increment of forest land on the degraded land reduce stream flow which shows the reduction of soil erosion. Therefore, this study results can be used to encourage different users and policymakers for planning and management of water resources in the Robigumero watershed as well as in other regions of Ethiopia. Graphical abstract