Spatiotemporal land cover dynamics and drivers for Dhidhessa River Basin (DRB), Ethiopia

Land cover change drives scale-dependent impacts on the environment. Effective environmental resources management, therefore, requires an understanding of the spatiotemporal land cover dynamics and their impacts at watershed scale. However, an integrated study that includes spatiotemporal land cover dynamics and the relative importance of drivers of the changes is missing for many basins in Ethiopia including the Dhidhessa River Basin (DRB). The objective of this study is to quantify historic and future land cover dynamics and to identify the relative importance of the drivers of the changes for the DRB. The post-classification comparison method and the cellular automata-Markov chain models were used for the analysis. The major land cover change driving factors were analyzed using the partial least square regression technique. The result revealed increasing waterbody, settlement, grassland, and agricultural lands at the expense of forest, and bush and shrubland in the past and future 30 years. Population density, slope, elevation, temperature, and rainfall were the drivers of land cover changes where population pressure is the primary driver. The observed land cover changes in the DRB could result in environmental degradation. Quantifying these impacts is, therefore, crucial to plan and implement informed land resources management strategies.