The current land use dynamics are dependent on the previous land conversion legacies in farming system of west oromia, Ethiopia

The land use analyses most often focused on the spatio-temporal change detection and how the current conversion status is associated with the previous legacies of land use dynamics are little understood. Here, we examined how the forest land use has been converted to other land use types, and if the intermittent and the current extent of the dynamics are associated with the previous extent of land conversions along spatio-temporal scale. For this, we performed the land use change detection with respective to simplified, moderate and complex landscapes forest cover gradients. These analyses were carried out for the periods of forty-five years (1973–2018) by employing supervised classification method. Our results showed that the forestland has been converted to other land use types at the annual rates of -1.23, -1.34 and -0.81 in simplified, moderate and complex landscapes, respectively. Especially, the rate of forest conversion to crop land has been higher in simplified and moderate landscapes when compared with that of the complex landscapes. These results show that the current statuses of land conversions are largely dependent on the landscape complexity gradients occurred as the result of land use legacies (varying intensity of land management regime in the past). Altogether, a landscape complexity per se is not only a guarantee, and the previous land conversion legacies and the current land use dynamics as well need to be considered in developing landscape management strategies.