Impact of Urban Expansion on the Agricultural Land Use a Remote Sensing and GIS Approach: A Case of Gondar City, Ethiopia

Abstract

Urbanization is an unavoidable phenomenon which ultimately converts the agricultural land into urban land which may impact the farmer's livelihood, agricultural production and consumers of the surrounding area negatively. In the present study GIS and Remote sensing approach is used to analyze the phenomena of agricultural land transformation into urban land use. The change detection method has been applied to realize the problem. The findings show that there is loss of farmland and displacement of the households who had been involved in farming. In general the higher rate of urban expansion, leads to the higher loss of agricultural land. The major corrective measures could be improvements on the spatial planning which could balance the land demand of urban areas and shrinking of agricultural land in and in the fringes of Gondar city.