Past and future land use/land cover changes from multi-temporal Landsat imagery in Mpologoma catchment, eastern Uganda
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Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Science
Abstract
Land use/cover (LULC) change is a major concern in Africa’s river basins and policy makers, environmentalists
and other stakeholders tackling biodiversity and sustainable development issues in these watersheds
require accurate information on past, present and future LULC projections to develop
management strategies for the concerned watersheds. This study assessed the historical, current and
future LULC changes in Mpologoma catchment. Remote sensing and supervised classification were used
to analyze 33-year multitemporal LULC changes in Mpologoma catchment while future patterns for the
next two decades were predicted using the Cellular Automata-Markov modelling technique in TerrSet’s
Land Change Modeler. Initially, in 1986, the catchment was dominated by grassland (32.08%). However,
most grassland (92.77%) was gradually converted to subsistence farming (75%) and built-up (15.7%).
Grassland, woodland and wetland annually declined at a rate of 5.52%, 2.47% and 0.63% respectively
while farmland and built-up expanded at 9.32% and 6.22% respectively and by 2019 subsistence farming
was the dominant class (53.16%). Prediction results showed that by 2039, woodland, grassland, wetland
and open water will decrease while there will be major increases in built-up and commercial farming
from 11.61% to 27.91% and 0.18% to 0.34% respectively. Subsistence farming will continue to be the dominant
land use by 2039 attributed to gains from woodland (4.7%), grassland (3.7%) and wetland (4.9%).
These LULC changes indicate an intensifying land use pressure in Mpologoma catchment and provide
useful information for land use planners, environmentalists and policymakers in this catchment to consider
when planning for sustainable management of the watershed.
Description
Keywords
Land change modeler, Multi-layer perceptron, Remote sensing, TerrSet, Watershed monitoring
Citation
Bunyangha, J., Majaliwa, M. J., Muthumbi, A. W., Gichuki, N. N., & Egeru, A. (2021). Past and future land use/land cover changes from multi-temporal Landsat imagery in Mpologoma catchment, eastern Uganda. The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Science, 24(3), 675-685. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrs.2021.02.003