Expansion of sugarcane monoculture: associated impacts and management measures in the semi-arid East African Rift Valley, Ethiopia.

The study examined the expansion of sugarcane monoculture over the period 1957-2010 and its implications for land degradation and land management measures in the semi-arid northern Main Ethiopian Rift Valley. It used multi-scale and multi-temporal imageries aided by qualitative surveying to investigate the dynamics of land use and cover changes. The study applied both a pixel-based supervised classification and feature extraction methods at subclass levels and merged them into major compatible and comparable land use and cover groups.