Assessment of Forest Covers Change in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia: The Case of Walmara District: Centeral Oromia (1985-2017)

In Ethiopia, forest cover changes were registered at local level that adds up to the changes observed at the national level. Likewise other part of the country the rapid advance of deforestation over recent decades has resulted in the conversion of the majority of the Walmara district forest in isolated patches. Geographic information system (GIS) techniques and remote sensing (RS) from satellite platforms offer a best way to identify forest cover change. The main objectives of the study were to examine and map the trends and extents of the forest cover changes and to identify the possible proximate causes during the study periods. Quantum GIS, ENVI and SPSS 16.0 were used for the analysis of the spatial and temporal forest cover change. A supervised image classification technique with Maximum likelihood classification algorism was applied on Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellite images of 1985, 2000 and 2017 respectively. The result from the satellite image classifications were demonstrated that forest cover of the district was exhibited area decrement consistently. From the result the area of the forest cover was 9238.41, 4748.13 and 1497.87 whereas non-forest experiences area increment consistently with 58219.47, 62710.11 and 65960.37 in 1985, 2000 and 2017 respectively.