Background: Assessment of soil loss rates is crucial to sustainably enhance the benefits of land resources and diminish the adverse impacts of land degradation thereby areas requiring immediate soil erosion management practices can be identified. The study aimed to examine the impacts of land cover dynamics on the spatiotemporal patterns of erosion hotspots. RUSLE factors were produced using GIS and remote sensing techniques. Results: The RUSLE model adapted to Ethiopian conditions was run for 2004 and 2014 where input data layers were overlaid. The results of the model showed clear patterns of changes characterized by gradual shifting of one erosion soil loss severity class into next higher class. There was a net increase in the total soil loss largely under the very high, low and very low soil loss severity classes by 8%, 21% and 9% despite a decline in other severity classes, respectively. It also revealed that more than two-third of the catchment has experienced soil losses rates higher than the tolerable value reported for Ethiopia over which agriculturists should be concerned. Conclusions: Therefore, the observed soil loss rate and sediment yield in the study catchment would lead to further ecological deterioration unless site-specific participatory watershed management practices are employed.

The present study was carried out to examine the suitability status of plots of land for selected land utilization types (teff -Eragrostis tef, maize -Zea mays and finger millet -Eleusine coracana). The land mapping units of the study area, prepared from land resource survey, were used for the purposes of land evaluation. The methodology used for land suitability evaluation was GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation following FAO (1976) guidelines involving matching diagnostic land qualities against crop requirements and assigning suitability rates for each land qualities. The weighted overlay analysis combining diagnostic soil, climate and topographic factors showed that the largest coverage (76.04, 69.52 and 67.79%) of the study area is classified as moderately suitable for teff, maize, and finger millet cultivation, respectively. The vector overlay analysis results revealed that about 20.25 and 63.92% of the catchment are moderately suitable and marginally suitable for cultivation of all selected land utilization types. This showed that competitions for the same parcel of land by different uses were possible. Thus, farmers could have freedom to choose a range alternative land utilization types with the same suitability level and allocate land utilization type that best meet his/her interest. Therefore, land suitability analysis for agricultural crops using multi-criteria evaluation in a GIS environment is a strong tool for measuring and valuating land in terms of the varying importance to decision makers for sustainable rainfed agriculture.