FOREST COVER CHANGES, AND COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVE ON ITS DRIVING FORCES IN SETEMA DISTRICT JIMMA ZONE,

Forests are the fundamental components of biodiversity that serve as the foundations of ecosystems, influencing human well-being through the services they provide, environmental and ecological regeneration, and cultural service. Forest cover change is an issue in the Setema district, resulting in soil loss, biodiversity loss, climate change, fuelwood limits, and agricultural equipment constraints. As a result, the overall goal of this research was to investigate forest cover changes in the Setema district, as well as the community's perspectives on their primary and indirect drivers. To achieve the study's goals, the researchers employed primary data, secondary data, a two-stage sampling strategy, and 384 home samples. QGIS, Minitab, and other applications were utilised in the research. Excel 2010, Microsoft. Between 1988 and 2018, forest land and grassland fell from 62104.4 ha (56.22%) to 43867ha (39.71%) and 17416.0 ha (15.77%) to 7208ha (6.53%), respectively. Agricultural land was expanded from 25553.5ha (23.13 percent) to 484805.5ha (43.89 percent) while settlement land was increased from 1840.33ha (1.58 percent) to 7562.79ha (6.85 percent). Overall accuracy ratings for the 1988, 1998, 2008, and 2018 periods were 82.6 percent, 85.5 percent, 87.6%, and 91.06 percent, respectively. Forest land cover, grassland cover, bushland cover, and wetland cover were reduced, while agricultural land, settlement land, and barren land were raised, based on downloaded satellite image categorization and qualitative study by KII, FGD, and HHs. According to popular opinion, the reduction of forest land and the growth of agricultural land Other land use land cover was caused by proximate drivers like fuelwood extraction, illegal wetland conversion to agricultural land, illegal timber production, agricultural expansion, and wood extraction for house construction, as well as underlying drivers like population growth, corruption, and a lack of institutional collaboration.

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