Landscape level rehabilitation for improved agricultural productivity and ecosystem services in Abreha-we-Atsibeha, northern Ethiopia

Rehabilitation of degraded land is becoming a solution to the enduring problem of natural resources degradation in northern Ethiopia though the benefits communities get are less accounted. In this paper we studied the effect of landscape level rehabilitation of degraded land on ecosystem services and the drivers of land use/land cover changes in Abreha-we-Atsibeha northern Ethiopia. Data used include Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM+) images field observations and information from local people. Supervised image classification using Maximum Likelihood Classifier algorithm was applied to produce land use/land cover (LULC) maps and analyze the changes from Landsat images over 26 years (1984 to 2010). People’s perceptions were used to explain the drivers of LULC change and the implication of the changes on ecosystem services. Between 1984 and 2010 shrub land and forestland cover increased by about two-fold with a rate of 54.8 and 19.5 ha yr-1 respectively. There was a reduction by about four-fold in bare land with a rate of 60.2 ha yr-1. Bare land made the highest conversion to other LULC classes while shrub land had experienced the most persistency. Farmers correlated the vegetation improvement with enhanced water availability which was used for domestic and irrigation purposes (x2 = 156 P = 0.001). The production of cereals such as wheat has increased from 1.8-ton ha-1 in 2001 to 2.95 ton ha-1 in 2010. Landscape conservation efforts can turn degraded land to productive areas with improved ecosystem service that can improve the resilience capacity of smallholder farmers.

---

• View source