Assessment of land use and land cover change in South Central Ethiopia during four decades based on integrated analysis of multi-temporal images and geospatial vector data

Analysis also showed that agriculture nowadays has reached its maximum extension on suitable lands and is expanding more and more into marginal lands threatening biodiversity in forests. Ways of sustainable agricultural intensification are thus urgently needed for land use planning. Without judging the efficacy of past measures, we claim that the enhanced remote sensing-based image analysis technique introduced here can assist in land use planning by identifying areas of success (expansion) and failures (land cover change) of certain practices that only become visible from a greater historical and spatial distance.