Abstract:
"This study aims to assess the extent of land use/land cover changes and their impacts on
ecosystem services, as well as the effectiveness of mitigation measures in the Kiltie
watershed, North-Western Ethiopia." The detection of land use/land cover changes via
remote sensing data, including their impacts and mitigation measure status, is crucial for the
study of the environmental sustainability of various decision-making support systems. The
information from land use/land cover change detection aids in lulc and socioeconomic
conservation and sustainable development, particularly ecosystem resource management.
This study focuses on identifying LULC changes, observing impacts, and viewing mitigation
measures taken at the selected study site. Primary data from questionnaires and secondary
remote sensing data from Landsat satellite images from USGS earth explorer were used. To
determine the number of samples, the Yamane-1967 formula was used. Landsat images of
thirty years at each ten years interval 1990, 2005 and 2020 images were used. ArcGIS10.8,
Google Earth, and Quantum-GIS were used for analysis to identify the LULC changes as well
as to cross-check the perceptions of the impacts and mitigate the LULC changes. For the
socioeconomic data, qualitative and quantitative analysis methods were applied to evaluate
three consecutive time series of five major land cover classes: forest, grazing, settlement farm
and bushlands. Image preprocessing, processing, classification, and accuracy assessment
were carefully conducted, and the image analysis output was validated via confusion
matrices, and the kappa coefficient was used for cross-checking the outputs. Therefore, from
the point validation, the 2020th image analysis result shows average user accuracies of 88%,
producer accuracies of 79.02% and kappa coefficients of 83%. The output shows that the
LULC change analysis is valid. Therefore, the study revealed significant increases in
agricultural land and settlement areas of 18.45% and 119.35%, respectively, for the past 30
years, and the perceptions and impacts of LULC changes are significantly observed by the
study site society. Additionally, the perceptions and efforts for mitigations are significantly
valid, although efforts to achieve sustainability have not yet been made. Therefore, effective
land management practices, integrated watershed management, and active community
participation are essential to prevent undesirable LULC changes since the watershed is
located inside Abay basine and Tana watershed which can bring siltation problem to the
Ethiopian Renaissance dam (GERD).
