Land Use and Land Cover Change and Its Drivers in Lake Singida Catchment, Tanzania, East Africa

Lakes and their catchments provide essential resources and ecosystem services. However, these global resources are impacted by various anthropogenic activities that drive changes in land use and land cover. The study that generated data for this paper used Landsat TM (1991), ETM+ (2000, 2010), and OLI (2020) satellite imagery to examine land use and land cover change in the Lake Singida catchment. To identify drivers for change, we engaged 19 key informants, conducted surveys of 382 household heads, and reviewed secondary data, including meteorological records, population statistics, and the FAO/UNESCO soil database. We employed purposive sampling for key informants, and random sampling for household heads. Land use types were categorized using supervised classification with the maximum likelihood classifier in ArcMap 10.7. The qualitative data were analysed through content analysis in MAXQDA (version 20), while quantitative data were assessed using IBM SPSS Statistics (version 21) and Microsoft Excel, 2016. The results depict an increase in agricultural land, bare land, built-up area and water body features by 1%, 29%, 13%, and 2%, respectively; and a decrease of bushland and grassland by 7% and 40%, respectively. The key drivers of these changes include climate change, poor soil conditions, population growth, in-migration, land demand, mode of land ownership, land size, urbanization, livestock grazing, human-induced fires, grass-cutting, and traditional salt extraction. These results offer valuable insights into land use dynamics, and highlight the need for sustainable land use planning to conserve natural habitats in the Lake Singida catchment; hence informing broader environmental policy.