Land use/Land cover Classification of Modjo River Catchment, Upper Awash Basin, Central Ethiopia

Abstract

<p>LULC maps play a significant and prime role in resource planning, management and monitoring in the formation of policies and programme required for development. Satellite sensor images, also called remote sensing images, due to their synoptic view, are a viable source of gathering effective land cover information. In this study the LULC based on the satellite image of years 2021 using remote sensing and GIS application where identify for Modjo river catchment. Hence the satellite images for this particular study were acquired from ETM+ images obtain from FAO Afrikaner database http://www.africover.org./index.htm.web site, which is a FREE Global Orthorectified Landsat Data accessing site via FTP. ArcGIS10.2 were used to process the satellite image and the identity of each class is determined by the combination of experience and ground truth. FISHER classifier technique of supervised image classification technique was applied to uncover commonly occurring and distinctive reflectance patterns in the imagery, on the assumption that these represent major land cover classes since the classes are known at the outset. Consequently valuable LULC Map were developed for Modjo river catchment. From the result, in Modjo river catchment five land use/cover such as agricultural land1086 km2, grassland 363 km2, Tree & Shrub 330 km2, Water body 154 km2 and Settlement 242 km2 of the total catchment area have identified and illustrated with different colors on the map. The Map can be utilized in formulating sustainable land development activity as well as in mitigating the challenges of land-degradation in the catchment.</p>