BayCEER Workshop 2016

Evaluating land use change in the Afar Region, Ethiopia, with remote sensing data

Introduction

The Afar is an arid crisis region in northeast Ethiopia, ridden by conflicts over land usage. This study aims to investigate how protected areas perform under such conditions. It also takes a closer look at the effects of the drought from 2002/03.

Material and Methods

For this purpose, we analysed land use and land cover changes in the Awash National Park and the Aledeghi Wildlife Reserve from 1984 to 2015. We classifed six Landsat images with Random Forests and compared the derived land use and land cover maps. To compensate for the lack of ground data we inferred past land use and land cover from recent observations combining photographs, Google Earth images and change detection.

Results

We identified four land use and land cover classes, namely pale grass / semi-wasteland with trees, forest, grassland / scrubland, agricultural area / wasteland. Comparing 1984 with 2015, we found a moderate shift from semi-wasteland towards forest in and at the western border of the reserve. Furthermore, both the park’s and the reserve’s grassland / scrubland strongly decreased, shifting towards semi-wasteland and wasteland. In addition, the drought of 2002/03 possibly caused violation of the reserve’s border, with agricultural trespassing at the northern and deforestation at the eastern margin.