Assessing land use and land cover change detection using remote sensing in the Lake Tana Basin, Northwest Ethiopia

Abstract Land use land cover (LULC) change detection based on remote sensing data is an important source of information for various decision support systems. Information derived from land use and land cover change detection is important to land conservation, sustainable development, and management of water resources. This purpose of this study is therefore concerned with identifying the change in land use and land cover detection of the Tana basin. To identify land cover changes detection; remote sensing data, satellite imagery and image processing techniques had done within three dates of 1986, 2002 and 2018 using Land sat TM 30 m resolution images. ENVI and Arc GIS soft wares had used to identify the changes. The classification had done using six land cover (water body, bushland, grassland, forestland, cultivated, and residential land) class. Preprocessing and classification of the images had analyzed carefully and accuracy assessment was tested separately using the kappa coefficient. The results showed that overall accuracy in the basin was 84.21%, 83.32% and 91.40% and kappa coefficient of 79.02%, 83.32%, 89.66% for the years 1986, 2002 and 2018 respectively. This study indicated that in the last 32 years period, agricultural land and residential areas had significantly increased by 15.61% and 8.05% respectively in the basin. Therefore, proper land management practices, integrated watershed management, and active participation of the local community should be advance to protect undesirable LULC change in the basin.