Application of GIS and Remote Sensing for Land Use and Land Cover Change in Kilite Awulalo, Tigray Ethiopia

This study examines the application of GIS and Remote Sensing in mapping Land Use and Land Cover change in Kilite Awulalo Woreda, Eastern Tigray Zone from 1972 to 2014. For this study, LANDSAT images of 1972 (Landsat-1 MSS); 1984 (Landsat-5 TM); 2000 (Landsat-7 ETM+) and 2014 (Landsat-8 OLI_TIRS) were used and analyzed using Arc GIS 10.1 and Erdas Imagine 13. Supervised classification scheme was used to classify the images. Under land use and land cover categories Agriculture land, Settlement land, Grazing land, Forest land, Bush land, Water bodies and Bare/stony land were studied. The result shows that Bush land was decreased from 1972 to 2014 which is 1972 (58007.88 hectare), 1984 (47900.79 hectare), 2000 (45000.1 hectare) and 2014 (40573.53 hectare) and forested land was decreased from the year 1984 (21706.65 hectare) to 2014 (11916.6 hectare). Agriculture and settlement area was increased from the year 1972 to 2014. Agriculture was increasing 13138.92, 20856.78, and 23000.09 to 30402.27 hectares from the year 1972, 1984, 2000 and 2014 respectively