Analyzing Land Use Land Cover Change And Its Impacts On Surrounding Agricultural Land Using Cellular Automata: The Case Of Fitche Town, Ethiopia

Abstract

The rapid expansion of urban area rose with population growth, movements and demands have a substantial impact on land use land cover change (LULCC). The study aims to analyze LULC changes and its impacts on the surrounding farmlands in Fitche town during the periods of 2002 to 2022. The study employed satellite images of Landsat TM for 2002, Landsat OLI datasets for 2013 and 2022. Support Vector Machine Algorithm of Supervised Classification has been applied to generate LULC maps of 2002, 2013 and 2022 years by using ENVI software and the accuracy of classified land use land cover maps were checked by confusion matrix to derive overall accuracy and results were above the minimum and acceptable threshold level. The produced LULC dynamics have been assessed by Cellular Automata (CA) in MOLUSCE Plugins using QGIS and Land Change Modeler (LCM) model to quantify the land use transitions between land cover classes, to identify gain and losses of each class categories in relation to other land cover classes and their spatial trend. Finally, Cellular Automata has been run to model LULC changes in the study area and to predict future land use changes. The parameter, such as DEM, slope, aspect and distance from the road are used as spatial variable maps in the processes of learning in ANN-Multi layer perception to predict their influences on LULC between 2002 and 2022. The actual and projected LULC maps for 2022 indicate a good level of accuracy, with an overall Kappa value of 0.83 and with a percentage of the correctness 88.8 %. ANN-Multi-layer perception model is then used to forecast changes in LULC for the years 2050. Generally, the results of this study have shown that there was an increased expansion of built up areas in the last 22 years from 10.43% in 2002 to 16.92 % in 2013 and to 25.76% in 2022 and agricultural land was inclined from 66.40% in 2002 to 54.93% in 2013 and decreased to 36.41% in 2022. The simulated result indicate that built-up area covers 29.76% in 2030, 32.31% in 2040 and 35.74% in 2050 and farmlands was expected to be 29.74% in 2030, 26.56% in 2040 and 22.01% in 2050 of the total area coverage. The findings assist farmers and policy-makers in developing optimal land use plans and better management techniques for the long-term development of natural resources.