A THESIS SUBMITTED TO DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF SCIENCE IN GEO_INFORMATICS (GIS)

Abstract

Land Use/ Land Cover Change (LU/LCC) is one of the major human induced global changes. Understanding the extents of LULCC is important to generate and provide helpful information to policymakers and development practitioners about the magnitude and trends of land use land cover change. This study presents the applications of GIS and remote sensing for land use land cover change analysis in case of Nechsar national park ,southern Ethiopia. Data from Landsat images 1989, 1998, 2009 and 2019 were used to develop the land use maps and quantify the changes. A supervised classification with the maximum likelihood classifier was used to classify the images. Key informant interviews and focused group discussions were conducted. Over the past three decades, agricultural land, cultivated land, wooded grass land, grass land, forest and water have increased while bush / shrub land areas have decreased. In 2019 (ten years later than 2009) also equivalent to its area coverage about thirty years ago (1989), which was 27,398.5 ha. In 2019 slightly about (33.1 % or 9073.6 ha) grass land and (26.4 % or 7224.5 ha) wooded grass land of the area of the national park was covered by grassland and wooded grass land, respectively. The park experienced improvement in area extent of grassland and forest cover in 2019 (ten years later than 2009 ), that is the area of these land cover classes was about 33.1 %( 9073.6 ha ) and 8.9% (2441.3 ha ) respectively, in 2019 water land with .2.3 %( 627.8 ha) area coverage of the park in 2019, revealed a declining trend or a continuous shrinkage in thirty years (1989-2019) and new land use built up area shares about 610.4 ha or 2.2 % of the total land use. Intensive agriculture without proper management practice has been a common problem of the area. Increased cultivation of steep slopes has increased the risk of erosion and sedimentation of nearby Abaya and chamo lakes. Multiple factors, such as biophysical, socio-economic, institutional, technological, and demographic, contributed to the observed LULCC in the study area. So an integrated management system and rules will be important to manage the impact.