Agricultural production is the immediate basis for food security and income of the majority of Central Ethiopia׳s population. Demographic change has led to ever-decreasing farmland area per household and expansion of agriculture into marginal lands. Climatic extremes have been further aggravating the situation in large parts of the region. Governments and state organizations have been assertive in land use related decisions but effects of land use policies often have become visible only after longer periods. Our study shows changes in land cover, tenure and land use over a period of four decades (1972–2013), reflecting influences of very contrasting political systems.
We used an approach of multi-temporal mid resolution satellite images, combined with visual interpretation and supervised classification, to enhance accuracy of land cover classification and dealing with varying cloud cover, which resulted in improvements of 12–30% over the conventional method.
The combination of enhanced image interpretation and consideration of the specific historical context allowed to draw conclusions on land cover and land use related trends – from collectivization and villagization to recent local techniques of soil conservation through stone bunds – across various agroecological zones of the study region.
Analysis also showed that agriculture nowadays has reached its maximum extension on suitable lands and is expanding more and more into marginal lands threatening biodiversity in forests. Ways of sustainable agricultural intensification are thus urgently needed for land use planning. Without judging the efficacy of past measures, we claim that the enhanced remote sensing-based image analysis technique introduced here can assist in land use planning by identifying areas of success (expansion) and failures (land cover change) of certain practices that only become visible from a greater historical and spatial distance.
Agricultural production is the immediate basis for food security and income of the majority of Central Ethiopia׳s population. Demographic change has led to ever-decreasing farmland area per household and expansion of agriculture into marginal lands. Climatic extremes have been further aggravating the situation in large parts of the region. Governments and state organizations have been assertive in land use related decisions but effects of land use policies often have become visible only after longer periods. Our study shows changes in land cover, tenure and land use over a period of four decades (1972–2013), reflecting influences of very contrasting political systems.We used an approach of multi-temporal mid resolution satellite images, combined with visual interpretation and supervised classification, to enhance accuracy of land cover classification and dealing with varying cloud cover, which resulted in improvements of 12–30% over the conventional method.The combination of enhanced image interpretation and consideration of the specific historical context allowed to draw conclusions on land cover and land use related trends – from collectivization and villagization to recent local techniques of soil conservation through stone bunds – across various agroecological zones of the study region.Analysis also showed that agriculture nowadays has reached its maximum extension on suitable lands and is expanding more and more into marginal lands threatening biodiversity in forests. Ways of sustainable agricultural intensification are thus urgently needed for land use planning. Without judging the efficacy of past measures, we claim that the enhanced remote sensing-based image analysis technique introduced here can assist in land use planning by identifying areas of success (expansion) and failures (land cover change) of certain practices that only become visible from a greater historical and spatial distance.
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