Land Use Land Cover Change Dynamics of Jigjiga Town and Toga Watershed: Using GIS and Remote Sensing Technique

Understanding the current land use and land cover dynamics will help to project the future changes and to initiate more appropriate policy interventions. This paper mainly focused on examining the land use land cover change dynamics of Jigjiga town and Toga watershed, of Somali regional state of Ethiopian by using GIS and remote sensing techniques. A qualitative and quantitative approach method was applied and satellite images of LANDSAT-7 and LANDSAT- 8 for the year 2003 and 2017 were downloaded from Earth Explorer website. Agricultural land, bare land, shrub/bush/tree, grass land, built up area and water body are the major land use land cover classes exist in the area. The LULC change detection map of both Jigjiga town and the study watershed show similar trend in most LULC change. However, the decreases in grass land and shrub/bush/tree cover were observed in the town as opposed to the study watershed. The expansion of built up area indicates the population number is increasing highly and the current urbanization policy is contributing for its expansion. On the other hand grass land and shrub land areas of the study watershed shows fluctuations and this ismay bethe similarity of spectral reflectance patterns of the grass lands and bare lands or the bare lands changes to grass lands and shrub lands. Population pressure, urbanization, fuel wood extraction and charcoal making, agricultural land expansions and overgrazing are the most drivers of land use and land cover dynamics of the study town and watershed. This shows major changes in the socio-ecological driving forces will affect the landscape dynamics of the study area. Therefore proper land use planning in both urban and rural areas of the study area is important to consider in the future.

Keywords: Jigjiga town, LULC, GIS, Drivers