Land Degradation Assessment Using Geo-spatial Modeling Approach The Case Of Dega Damot District North-western Ethiopia

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Land degradation is an increasing problem in Ethiopia. Combating in land degradation needs an improvement in awareness on causes, impact, and degree of degradation. Therefore, land degradation assessment is the main aim in a decision support system for reversing degradation. The main objective of this study is to asses land degradation through modeling of land use and land cover, soil erosion, and biodiversity Status. Land/use and land cover classification were made from Landsat 5, Landsat 7ETM+ and Landsat 8 OLI for the years 1990, 2005, and 2020 through supervised classification in ENVI 5.3. Seven different types of and/use and land/cover were identified. Using the post-classification method accuracy assessment was computed for each study period resulted in an overall accuracy of 87%, 86%, and 87% respectively. The change detection was analyzed and validated with the aid of field data coupled with Google Earth. The findings of the study show land use/ Land cover change 1990, 2005, and 2020 crop land, urban settlement, and grass land increase in expense of other land use while forest and shrub land vanished seriously for the last 30 years. Soil erosion estimation was done by compiling RUSLE model results and gully erosion maps with multi-criteria evaluation methods. The study area found that nearly 75% has been moderate to severe levels of soil erosion severity. Moreover, biodiversity degradation hotspot of the study area was computed with the combined proxy factors of road, settlement, slope, and land/use and/cover. And the result revealed that about 0.5%, 21.2%, 54.3%, 20.4%, and 3.6% of the district experienced very low, low, moderate, high, and very high levels respectively. To produce the final composite land degradation map of the study area, vegetation, soil erosion, and biodiversity degradation levels have been standardized and normalized with analytical hierarchy and pairwise comparison techniques. Therefore, the combined multi-criteria analysis result showed that about 20%, 44%, 32%, and 4% exhibits low, moderate-high, and very high levels of land degradation levels. The study area comes up with biodiversity followed by soil erosion severity as critical levels of land degradation. Thus, the study suggests afforestation programs, soil, and water conservation, and different sustainable land management practices should start by identifying the hotspot areas.

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Land Degradation Assessment Using Geo-spatial Modeling Approach The Case Of Dega Damot District North-western Ethiopia

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