TITLE:
Tradeoffs of Small Scale Irrigation and Its Contribution to Land Use and Land Cover Change in Mai-Dimu, Tahtay Koraro Wereda, North-Western Tigray, North Ethiopia
AUTHORS:
Samuel Fissaha, Fassil Kebede, Bobe Bedadi, Atkilt Girma
KEYWORDS:
Accuracy Assessment, GIS, Kappa Coefficient, Remote Sensing, and LULC
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.9 No.2,
April
30,
2017
ABSTRACT: Improving and understanding of land use and land cover change (LULC) can help in projecting future land use dynamics and provide appropriate interventions for achieving better land management. The aim of this study is to evaluate the status of induced small scale irrigation practices that affect the different land use changes over time in mai-dimu Kebele, Tigray, northern Ethiopia. Remote Sensing (RS), Geographic Information System (GIS) were used to determine the LULC dynamics with its land cover changes (1995-2015) by dividing in to three decades. In analyzing the accuracy assessment, the Kappa coefficient was found strong agreement between classified land cover classes and observed land cover/use with greater than 80% values. The coverage of cultivated land has high land use map cover with 28.45%, 31.83% and 27.74% in 1995, 2005 and 2015 respectively. No irrigation practice was observed in 1995 and 2005. However, in 2015 it was covered with 1.65 % of irrigated land. While the overall change difference from the year 1995 to 2015, was also by enlarge attributed to expansion of settlement, dam, cultivated land and irrigated lands increased positively with 700.20 ha, 124.02 ha, 33.48 ha and 181.98 ha respectively which subsequently decrease the land use of grass land (?336.48 ha), bush land (?561.52 ha), bare or rocky land (?68.94 ha) and forest land (?343.03 ha). Hence, inducing the irrigation practices could be additional yield production under dry season which later helps in improving the lively hood of the community.