Time Series Land Cover Mapping and Change Detection Analysis Using Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing, Northern Ethiopia

Land use planners require up-to-date and spatially accurate time series land resources information and changing pattern for future management. As a result, assessing the status of land cover change due to population growth and arable expansion, land degradation and poor resource management, partial implementation of policy strategies, and poorly planned infrastructural development is essential. Thus, the objective of the study was to quantify the spatiotemporal dynamics of land use land cover change between 1995 and 2014 using 5 multitemporal cloud-free Landsat Thematic Mapper images. The maximum likelihood (ML)-supervised classification technique was applied to create signature classes for significant land cover categories using means and variances of the training data to estimate the probability that a pixel is a member of a class. The final Bayesian ML classification resulted in 12 major land cover units, and the spatiotemporal change was quantified using post-classification and statistical change detection techniques. For a period of 20 years, there was a continuously increasing demand for arable areas, which can be represented by an exponential growth model. Excepting the year 2009, the built- up area has shown a steady increase due to population growth and its need for infrastructure development. There was nearly a constant trend for water bodies with a change in slope significantly less than +0.01%. The 2014 land cover change statistics revealed that the area was mainly covered by cultivated, wood, bush, shrub, grass, and forest land mapping units accounting nearly 63%, 12%, 8%, 6%, 4%, and 2% of the total, respectively. Land cover change with agro-climatic zones, soil types, and slope classes was common in most part of the area and the conversion of grazing land into plantation trees and closure area development were major changes in the past 20 years.