Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Tropical Ecology https://doi.org/10.1007/s42965-020-00113-6 RESEARCH ARTICLE Geo‑spatial approach for land‑use and land‑cover changes and deforestation mapping: a case study of Ankasha Guagusa, Northwestern, Ethiopia Samson Tsegaye Mekasha 2  · K. V. Suryabhagavan 1  · Mersha Gebrehiwot 2 Received: 22 January 2020 / Revised: 17 July 2020 / Accepted: 25 August 2020 © International Society for Tropical Ecology 2020 Abstract Deforestation is the replacement of forest by other land-use. Land-use patterns are changing fast in worldwide in relation to the human population growth and agricultural land expansion. The study deals with the status and trends of land-use and land-cover (LULC) dynamics and identifcation of deforestation risk zones Ankasha Guagusa, northwestern, Ethiopia fol- lowing in the recent advancement in geospatial approach. The temporal Landsat satellite data from 1985 to 2018 was used for the analysis. Supervised classifcation approach with maximum likelihood algorithm was adopted for the classifcation and generation of land-use and land-cover maps for the chosen time periods. Results reveal that there have been substantial changes in the LULC during the selected periods. During the period 1985–1996 showed increased the cropland, bare-land and built-up with 835 ha (1.78%), 186.54 ha (0.4%) and 112. ha (0.24%), respectively. In the second period (1996–2006) forest land, built-up and cropland increased with 1094 ha (2.33%), 346.78 ha (0.74%) and 2185.7 ha (4.65%), respectively. This implies that the forest cover change had decreased by 1119.78 ha (2.38) in the frst period and increased in the second and third period with 1094.04 ha (2.33%) and 772.91 ha (1.64%), respectively. It was raveled that forest cover though remained relatively stable around western part of the study area. Identifcation of deforestation risk zone to examine fve factors cri- teria was selected such as infrastructure, topographic and socio-economic behavior of the area. These are slope, proximity to road, population density, proximity to river and proximity to town. Each criterion was evaluated with the aid of AHP and mapped by GIS. The degree of deforestation risk was categorized as extreme, high, moderate and low suitability areas, which represented 2%, 40.27%, 56.65% and 1.04%, of the study area, respectively. Therefore, sustainable forest management system is necessity to protect, conserve and rehabilitate the remaining forest. Keywords Landsat · Land-use change · Modeling deforestation · Remote sensing · Supervised classifcation Introduction Over the past decade, remote sensing data as a basis for generating valuable information for land-use and land- cover (LULC) is by now widely recognized (Helmut and Eric 2001; Turner et al. 2009; Melakneh et al. 2010; Hegazy and Kaloop 2015; Sekertekin et al. 2017). Land-use and land-cover are diferent terms, however, land-cover is the observed bio-physical cover on the earth’s surface and land- use refers to human interaction with the environment and is characterized by the interference of people on certain land- cover type (Anderson 1976; Lo 1986; Tripathi and Kumar 2012; Ayele et al. 2014; Demeke and Afework 2014). The last few decades marked massive changes in land-use and land-cover in forest ecosystems of Ethiopia (Melakneh et al. 2010; Misrak et al. 2012). These changes, human induced land-use and land-cover is considered as one of the most important factor for global environmental changes. Rapid replacements of land-cover by various land-use categories are observed globally (Geist and Lambin 2001; Ellis 2015; Wu et al. 2018). Successive studies on the trends of LU/LC International Society for Tropical Ecology Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42965-020-00113-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * K. V. Suryabhagavan drsuryabhagavan@gmail.com 1 School of Earth Sciences, Addis Ababa University, P.O. Box 1176, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 2 Wondo Genet College of Forestry and Natural Resources, Hawassa University, Shashemene 128, Ethiopia