Land use/cover change dynamics and its effect on Gully erosion in the mitike watershed, beles sub- Basin, ethiopia

Abstract

Gully erosion is one of the main causes of land degradation, especially in human-induced activities in the warm humid lowland of Mitike watershed, Beles River Basin, Ethiopia. However, regarding this, conversion land use/ cover relation to gully formation have not been well studied in this watershed. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess spatio-temporal changes in gully length and density due to land use/cover (LULC) changes in the Mitike watershed of the Beles sub-basin of Ethiopia. Landsat 5TM (1985), 7ETM + (2005), and 8OLI-TIRS (2023) images were used to evaluate the LULC changes over the past 38 years. All images were classified using the supervised classification technique of a Maximum Likelihood Algorithm (MLA), along with field survey results. Accuracy assessments were performed using simple random sampling techniques for each reference year.