THE EFFECT OF WATERSHED MANAGEMT MEASURES IN REVERSING THE RISK OF LAND USE AND LAND COVER CHANGES: THE CASE OF HARE SUB WATERSHED, SOUTHERN ETHIOPIA

Abstract

Though well known for healthy watershed ecosystems, changes in land-use and land-cover however, have been bottlenecked the watershed health and its services. In response to that, the Ethiopian government has implemented conservation programs to cope with deforestation and restore degraded areas. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the effect of watershed management measures on reversing the risk of land-use and land-cover changes: the case of Hare sub-watershed, Gamo Gofa zone, Southern Ethiopia. A cross sectional research design containing both qualitative and quantitative were adopted. Firstly, remote sensing datasets were acquired from U.S. Landsat program (http://landsat.usgs.gov). Secondly, the multi-stage sampling procedure was employed to select the sample respondents. Then, a total of 147 respondents composed of both male and female-headed households were drawn from the total sample frame. Collected data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science v. 26, ERDAS IMAGINE v. 2015 and Geographic Information System v. 10.8. Supervised classification using Maximum Likelihood classification was carried out to analyze 1998, 2010, and 2022 images. An overlay procedure was used to detect changes in land-use and land-cover. For in-depth investigation, normalized difference vegetation index were adopted. Furthermore, the Pearson Correlation matrix as well as binary logistic regression was used to test the hypothesized variables. The study findings revealed a progressive increase in cropland and built up while bare land and grassland declined during study period (1998 – 2022). On the other hand, an overall increment in areas under dense vegetation was evidenced. This implies the usefulness of the implemented measures. However, cropland intensification coupled with an increment in areas under settlements accelerates the declining trends in grassland. In addition, the result from household survey also shows that only 59 (out of 147 respondents) experienced income improvement. This implies that the income improvement remained low - almost 1/3 of the total sample respondents since the watershed management measures were implemented in the area. Finally, from hypothesized variables sex, age, education, total cultivated land, and perception were found to have significantly related to income improvement. An in-depth investigation by correlating normalized difference vegetation index with the primary production (yield from field crops) using an object-based change detection technique with high spatial resolution images was recommended.