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Changes in land use/cover mapped over 80 years in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia

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Abstract

Despite many studies on land degradation in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia, quantitative information regarding long-term changes in land use/cover (LUC) is rare. Hence, this study aims to investigate the LUC changes in the Geba catchment (5142 km2), Northern Ethiopia, over 80 years (1935–2014). Aerial photographs (APs) of the 1930s and Google Earth (GE) images (2014) were used. The point-count technique was utilized by overlaying a grid on APs and GE images. The occurrence of cropland, forest, grassland, shrubland, bare land, built-up areas and water body was counted to compute their fractions. A multivariate adaptive regression spline was applied to identify the explanatory factors of LUC and to create fractional maps of LUC. The results indicate significant changes of most types, except for forest and cropland. In the 1930s, shrubland (48%) was dominant, followed by cropland (39%). The fraction of cropland in 2014 (42%) remained approximately the same as in the 1930s, while shrubland significantly dropped to 37%. Forests shrank further from a meagre 6.3% in the 1930s to 2.3% in 2014. High overall accuracies (93% and 83%) and strong Kappa coefficients (89% and 72%) for point counts and fractional maps respectively indicate the validity of the techniques used for LUC mapping.

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Acknowledgements

This research was carried out thanks to a scholarship of the Special Research Fund (BOF) obtained from Ghent University, Belgium. Costs during the field works were partially covered by the RIP-MU (VLIR, Belgium) project. The Mekelle University is acknowledged for its facilitations and logistic arrangements for this research. Samuele Tesfaye contributed largely by sharing data and providing technical GIS assistance. Thanks to Sabine Cnudde for proofreading of this manuscript. Finally, we are grateful to Mr. Kahsu Kiros for the many rides over bad roads to access the field areas.

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Etefa, G., Frankl, A., Lanckriet, S. et al. Changes in land use/cover mapped over 80 years in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia. J. Geogr. Sci. 28, 1538–1563 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11442-018-1560-3

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