Abstract
Land use and land cover (LULC) change significantly affects environmental processes and sustainable land management in river basins. The Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia, has experienced significant LULC changes due to population growth, agricultural expansion, and deforestation. This study examines past and future LULC dynamic patterns using an integrated cloud-based framework implemented in Google Earth Engine. Classification and regression tree, random forest (RF), and support vector machine classifiers were used to process multi-temporal Landsat imagery. RF achieved the highest overall accuracy (94.4%) and kappa (0.879) in 2024. The results reveal pronounced agricultural expansion and substantial forest loss over the past two decades. Using the RF-derived LULC maps, a Cellular Automata–Markov model was calibrated and validated with strong agreement (Kappa = 0.886) to project future changes. Projections to 2034 and then 2044 indicate continued expansion of agricultural and built-up areas at the expense of forests and shrub/grasslands. The results support improved land use planning and environmental sustainability in the basin.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank NASA-GLCF and the USGS for providing free access to Landsat satellite imagery. We also express our gratitude to the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture for supplying ground truth data. Additionally, we appreciate the constructive comments from the anonymous reviewers, which improved the quality of this manuscript, along with the contributions from all individuals and institutions that supported this research.
Funding
This research was supported by the National Science Fund Project (Grant No. 52130907).
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Arega, S.Y., Yan, D., Qin, T. et al. GEE-integrated ML classifiers evaluation for LULC change detection and CA-Markov-based future prediction in Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-58727-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-58727-0
Keywords
- LULC change
- Upper Blue Nile River Basin
- ML classification
- Google earth engine
- CA–Markov
- Future LULC simulation
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