Abstract:
Mara River basin forms part of the Upper Nile catchment and critical for the Maasai Mara –
Serengeti ecosystem. Its rich mix of land cover types including natural forests andopen savanna
are threatened by unplanned land uses in the upper catchment. The objective of the study was to
determine the nature and extent of change in land cover and land use between 1984 and 2016.
Unsupervised classification of dry season Landsat imageries for 1984, 1995, 2003, 2011 and
2016 was conducted using ENVI 5.0 and ArcGIS 10.5 with eight land cover types including
forestland, shrub land, grassland, cropland, wetland, water body, built-up area and bare land.
Post-classification area analysis of the thematic mapsand overlay operations of classified images
was conducted for change detection. The results showed that forestland, shrub land and grassland
are decreasing in extent at the expense of cropland and built-up areas. Wetlands and water bodies
had no definite trends of change. Between 1984 and 2016, forestland, shrub land and grassland
decreased by 1.3%, 6.82% and 5.51% with cropland and built-up area increasing by 8.22% and
0.07% respectively. These changes have negative impacts on the Mara River hydrological
regimes and on the environment with implications for livelihoods and biodiversity. There is need
for proactive measures to mitigate or control the adverse impacts on this important
transboundary resource |
