Land use/land cover change is a global environmental problem that significantly affects sustainable development and environmental quality. Anthropogenic activities are one of the main driving forces of land use/land cover change in developing countries like Ethiopia. This study is conducted in the Geba watershed in southwestern parts of Ethiopia. This study aimed to analyze the land use/land cover change over the past thirty years using geospatial technologies. The present study uses Landsat TM 1990, Landsat ETM + 2003, and OLI/TIRS 2020 to examine the land use/land cover change between 1990 and 2020. Land use/land cover classes are classified using a supervised classification method with the maximum likelihood technique. Results show that the agricultural land increased significantly, from 1786.6 km2 (37.2%) in 1990 to 3163.2 km2 (65.8%) in 2020, representing an increased rate of 45.9 km2/year. On the other hand, dense forest has declined from 2129.2 km2 (44.3%) in 1990 to 1127.8 km2 (23.5%) in 2020, which declines by the rate of 33.4 km2/year. Our findings suggest that sustainable land use planning and management are critically important in the study area.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.