Retrospective land use land cover change detection using geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing techniques: The Case of Andasa Micro-Watershed, Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia

Abstract

Land use/land cover change is a general term for the modification and conversion of the earth's surface by human and natural factors. Land cover is the physical and biological cover of the surface. Land use covers the results of human activities for the exploitation of it. The objective of this study was to detect land cover/use changes in Andasa Watershed between the years 1995 to 2015. The study has used ArcGIS10.1 and ERDAS IMAGINE 2010, land sat images of 1995 and 2015 and socioeconomic data to analyze land cover and landuse changes of Andasa watershed. The study has found that due to the population increase and improper agricultural activity forest and bush lands have declined whereas farm and bare lands expanded between the study years. Forest land and shrub land jointly decreased by 14349.23 hectare which is 23.87% of the total watershed area, whereas, cultivated land and bare land jointly increased by16010.32 hectare of land which is 26.63% of the total watershed area between the study periods, respectively. The rapid expansion of croplands and bare lands were entirely attributed to the alarming rate of depletion of forests, woods and shrubs. There is an urgent need to limit the population growth rate and implementing appropriate land use policy in the Andasa watershed.

Changes in the constituents of the “Bosque de Agua” of the Sierra Cruces-Ajusco-Chichinautzín, Mexico, an area with payment for environmental services

“…From the forest inventories of Mexico and the vegetation maps at the national level, some authors have produced maps of changes (Mas et al 2002(Mas et al , 2004(Mas et al , 2009Palacio-Prieto et al 2000;Rosete-Vergés et al 2014) and others have evaluated the quality of the original reference material (Mas et al 2009) produced at a scale of 1:250,000; however, with small working scales and with materials so diverse the results are not always comparable. Most of the published studies are on land use change, on the basis of the automated scanning of satellite images (Mas et al 2004;Frolking et al 2009;Arunarwati et al 2012;Kerebeh and Shiferaw 2018). In contrast, the present study, based on visual interpretation of orthophotographs and Spot images with a spatial resolution of 2 m/pixel and 1.5 m/pixel, respectively, has allowed an evaluation of forest degradation, forest improvement, deforestation that occurs in a scattered manner on a small scale (Muñoz-Piña et al 2007), and small-scale logging, not detectable with satellite images (Vidal, et al 2014); evaluation of this type at the spatial resolutions used in the present study would be difficult to achieve with satellite images at this resolution and over this time frame.…”