Consequences of Temporal Land Cover Changes on Ecosystem Services in Babile Elephant Sanctuary, Eastern Ethiopia

Land cover (LC) change has been identified as one of the leading drivers of changein the ecosystem and its services. However, information on the impact of temporal land coverchange on the ecosystem and ecosystem services in Ethiopia is largely unknown. Thus, thisstudy examined the impacts of temporal LC changes on the ecosystem and ecosystem services(ESs) provision in Babile Elephant Sanctuary (BES) during the period of 1977 to 2017 using alandsat image analysis and questionnaire survey. In BES, woodland covered the largest area inthe year 1977, 1997 and 2017, followed by bushland and agricultural land. However, there wasa consistent decline in woodland and bushland from 56.5% and 31.1% coverage in the year1977 to 45.3 and 27.2% in the year 2017, respectively. Agricultural land and settlementsincreased from the year 1977, when they covered about 3.5 and 0.1%, respectively to 2017,when they covered 17.3 and 3.4%, respectively. We found significant (p<0.05) differences inthe social perception of the positive and negative impacts of land cover change on ecosystemservices. The respondents recognized the negative impact of agricultural land expansion andsettlement on the ecosystem such as the provision of wild food, livestock feed, medicinalplants, fresh water, fuel-wood, raw materials and climate regulation leading to an increase infood shortage and vulnerability to frequent drought and flood. Therefore, it is necessary totake urgent measures to prevent the losses in ecosystem and ecosystem services as a result ofland cover change that occurs because of human activities