Spatiotemporal Analysis of Jorgo Wato Forest Cover Changes, West Wallagga, Oromia, Ethiopi

A study was conducted in the Jorgo Wato forest, located in the West Wallagga zone and extending to the Buno Bedelle zone of Oromia National Regional State, with the objective of assessing the dynamics of forest cover change in the Jorgo Wato forest over the last three decades (1986–2016). In order to assess forest cover changes, the whole study period was categorized into three periods: 1986–1995, 1995–2006, and 2006–2016. Satellite images from Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI/TIRS were used in this study. Support Vector Machines for supervised classification and post-classification were used for image classification, with results showing an overall accuracy of up to 99.49%, maximum producer’s accuracies of up to 99.80, and User’s accuracies of up to 100%, while the Kappa coefficient ranged between 96.98% and 99.17%. The result of the change analysis revealed that forests changed from 67.62% in 1986 to 74.77% in 2016, with an average rate of change of 20.13ha/year from 1986 to 2016, whereas farmland changed from 19.60% in 1986 to 12.28% in 2016, with a variation through 30 years and an average rate of change of -20.604ha/year from 1986-2016. Changes in forest cover increment have come from the expansion of coffee plantations and plantations of different tree species by the communities and by Oromia Forest and Wildlife Enterprise till now. Monoculture plantations cannot take the place of a natural forest and cannot support a lot of biodiversity, which is crucial for the management of natural resources. Future maintenance of the region's environmental equilibrium will require a method of combining both systems and concentrating more diverse species.