Establishing land use/cover change patterns over the last two decades and associated factors for change in semi-arid and sub humid zones of Tanzania

Abstract

This study investigated landuse cover change patterns and established potential environmen- tal and social factors that have contributed to changes in two zones namely sub humid and semi-arid found in southern highland and cen- tral parts of Tanzania respectively. The overall objective was to understand change patterns; the process evolves and clearly isolates various factors that have contributed to the changes over the last 20 years. A total of four villages, two in each zone were involved whereby historical land use cover changes were analysed using remote sensing techniques. To do so satellite imageries for 1991 and 2011 and those of 1986 and 2009 for sub humid and semi-arid zones respectively. Factors for changes were estab-lished through focus group discussions (FDGs) with a total of 80 participants (20 per village) and household (HH) interviews subjected to 10% of the total number of HH per village. Both wood-lands and bush lands decreased in the expense of mixed farming in both sub humid and semi- arid zones to a maximum of 121% and 146.8% re- spectively. Wetland farming also increased par- ticular in sub humid zone. In general, both envi- ronmental and social factors were found to have contributed to LUCC in various magnitudes in both zones. Such observed change on landuse will continue and it is recommended that there is a need to have in place and implement proper landuse plan also have capacity building pro-grams on climate and land management issues for both livelihood and ecosystem sustainability need to in place.