Abstract:
Rapid urban expansion is becoming the Characteristics of cities in developing countries.
Hence, it is normal to assess and monitor urban growth changes using remote sensing and
other spatial tools to quantify urban sprawl that provide paramount information for city
administration. Urban growth pattern of Jimma for the last two decades (1997 to 2017) was
studied. Satellite images and geospatial tools were employed to quantify and analyze the
spatiotemporal urban land use changes during the study periods, the acquired satellite
images were classified and land-use Land cover maps were produced using maximum
likelihood of supervised classification method. Post classification change detection analysis
and selected spatial metric indices (shannon Entropy) calculation were made to detect, and
monitor urban growth and quantify urban sprawl in the study area. Change detection
analysis results indicated that, the built-up area constituted 25.16% for 1997, 43.97 % for
2007, and 48.02% for the year 2017. The analysis of urban sprawl shows the city is
expanding evenly to the east, west, and north direction. High sprawl is observed to the south
directions, therefore, the city planners need to plan ahead and implement plans properly to
cope up with the rapid and unprecedented growth of the city in the years to come.
