Impact of landscape dynamics and intensities on the ecological land of major cities in Ethiopia

Abstract

Background Understanding the dependence of ecological land and dynamics of the human-nature-coupled landscape is crucial for urban ecosystem resilience. In this study, we characterized and compared the Spatio-temporal responses of ecological land to urban landscape dynamics in Bahir Dar, Addis Ababa, Adama, and Hawassa cities in Ethiopia for the last three decades (1990–2020). Three sets of Landsat satellite images, field observations, and urban land indexes were used to produce landscape maps and geo-spatial data analysis. Results The results showed that in all cities ecological land has had changed intensely during 1990–2020 regarding its quantity, and spatial pattern. Besides, the substantial expansion of built-up ecosystems was manifested at the cost of ecological land. The built-up ecosystem was augmented by 17,341.0 ha (32.16%), 2151.27 ha (19.64%), 2715.21 ha (12.21%), and 2599.65 ha (15.71%) for Addis Ababa, Adama, Bahir Dar, and Hawassa cities respectively from 1990 to 2020 periods. A total of 40.97% of the prolonged built-up area was obtained from urban agricultural land alone. Moreover, urban sprawl is likely to continue, which will be outweighed by the loss of the open space ecosystem. The finding also confirmed the value of land-use intensity (LUI) of Addis Ababa (3.31), Bahir Dar (3.56), Hawassa (4.82), Adama (5.04) was augmented parallel with accelerated growth in the built-up ecosystems. Besides, the Integrated land-use dynamics degree (ILUDD) analysis confirmed that the spatial pattern of ecological land loss significantly consistent with LUI in all cities. Conclusion Land-use intensity (LUI) dynamics pattern was followed by urban ecological land to the multi-complex human-dominance ecosystem with a substantial influence on urban greenery and ecosystem services provides. Thus, in all cities, the implementation of effective ecological land management and urban planning policies are required to ensure economic development and ecosystem resilience.

Integrated modelling techniques to implication of demographic change and urban expansion dynamics on water demand management of developing city in Lake Hawassa Watershed, Ethiopia

“…The result is also consistent with similar studies of Wondrade et al (2014) and Degefu et al (2021). The outward urban expansion mainly in the North (N), Northeast (NE), South (S), and Southeast (SE) directions.…”

Dynamics of green spaces- Land surface temperature intensity nexus in cities of Ethiopia

“…Although, the economic development and population density rate varied substantially among them. For example, Addis Ababa is the only metropolitan in Ethiopia and about a quarter of the urban population in Ethiopia lives in it [ 8 , 10 , 60 ]. [ 59 ] scrutinized the spatial patterns of major cities in Ethiopia and found a similar conclusion, that is, urbanization in the major cities of Ethiopia was very rapid.…”

“…In this study, for example, Hawassa and Bahir Dar have large water bodies, while relatively low industrialization and anthropogenic actively as compared to Addis Ababa and Adama do not have large water bodies. Conversely, analysis of the spatial relation between the LST and non-remote sensing variables may provide a tangible indicator for the need for urban landscape resilience [ 3 , 8 , 10 , 61 ].…”

“…In this study, the accuracy was assessed using a validation dataset obtained from historical high-resolution imagery made available by Google to assess the accuracy of classification of the current imagery (2020), Geographical Positioning System (GPS) was used to collect ground-truthing data [ 8 ]. Finally, the land use and land cover map with five illustrious classes for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 and temporal deviations per city was produced and interpreted [ 8 , 10 ]. The five land use and land cover nomenclature ( Table 3 ) were done according to CORINE Land Cover level 1 nomenclature [ 19 ].…”

“…Even though some studies have been conducted, the results focused on the linear relationship between LST and single influencing factors, such as biophysical factors [ 67 ]. Specifically in Ethiopia, there are a few studies that are spatially limited and focused on single-factor analysis [ 9 , 11 , 20 , 63 ] and failed to disclose the comprehensive characterization of the LST-green space nexus [ 9 , 10 ]. In addition, a couple of issues of great importance serve to justify our research: 1) The analyzed cities do not have enough UGS-LST interlinks studies for responses with spatial and temporal variability.…”