Modelling historic and future land use/land cover changes and their impact on wetland area in Shashe sub-catchment, Zimb
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Modelling historic and future land use/land cover changes and their impact on wetland area in Shashe sub‑catchment, Zimbabwe Sethi Sibanda1 · Fethi Ahmed2 Received: 24 July 2019 / Accepted: 5 September 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The purpose of this study was to use current and historic land use/land cover (LULC) changes to predict future LULC using coupled Cellular Automata–Markov chain model. Landsat time series data for the month of June were used to determine LULC changes for the years 1984, 1995, 2005 and 2015 using random forest classification system in R. We then used Markov Chain algorithm with multiple perceptron in land change modeler to simulate future LULC dynamics for the years 2025, 2035 and 2045. Contingent valuation method was employed to estimate ecological value of wetlands. Results for the LULC analysis for the period between 1984 and 2015 show a decline in woodland and wetland area owing to natural and human factors. We noted a reduced net change for grassland, woodland and mountain vegetation covers losing by − 4%, − 5.2%, − 2% and − 4% change, respectively. While, riverine vegetation, crop field and rock outcrop gained by 0.5%, 4% and 10.2%, respectively. A notable dramatic decline in wetland area was recorded between 1995 and 2005 losing about 125.53 ha, which could be attributed to recurrent droughts of 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2005. Major conversions were from wetland cover to crop fields suggesting agricultural encroachment onto the wetland area. Wetland area, thus, significantly decreased by 6% (p
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