Analysis of Urban Land Use Land Cover Change and Their Drivers: Case of Bule Hora Town West Guji Zone Oromiya Region, Ethiopia

Abstract: Understanding and quantifying the spatio- temporal dynamics of urban land use and land cover changes and its driving factors is essential to forward the right monitoring mechanisms on urban growth for decision making. The objective of this study was to analyze urban land use land cover changes and their drivers in Bule Hora town by using GIS and remote sensing techniques. In order to achieve this, satellite data of Landsat ETM+ for 2000 and 2010 Landsat 8 for 2020 have been obtained and preprocessed using ERDAS imagine. Using three-period (2000,2010, and 2020)remote sensing images and with the support of GIS and RS, spatial pattern of land use change of Bule Hora town in 20 years. The maximum likelihood decision rule of supervised Classification has been used to generate land use and land cover maps. For the accuracy of classified land use and land cover maps, a confusion matrix was used to derive overall accuracy and results were above the minimum and acceptable threshold level. The study showed that the main trends of Bule Hora town's 1and use change were the transforming from agricultural land, uncultivated, vegetation and bare land to built-up areas. Among which, the transformed area from agriculture and uncultivated land to built-up from 2000-2020 was 7.8% (367.7ha) and 3.1% (174.6ha) of the tota1 area. And the dynamic degree of agricultural land was the big. The spatial difference of 1and use change was obvious, and the change in western direction of town was very big. Accesses to improved infrastructure (road), Population increase, and economic development are major driving forces for 1and use change of the study area. A post classification change detection method and Markov chain model of Land Use Land Cover change were used to analyze the past and future Land Use Land Cover dynamics. Generally, the results of this study have shown that there was an increased expansion of built up areas in the last 20 years from 2.8% in 2000 to 10.7% in 2010 and 13.6% in 2020 at the expense of agriculture land. The spatial trend of built up areas also showed that there was a growing trend in the all direction but more it expanded to western, and eastern part of Bule Hora town relative to other directions. Therefore, the findings of this study could provide as decision making for urban planning.