Land use types in Southwest Ethiopia, 1974 - 2011

This data set contains land use types for 246 fields in Gera district in Southwestern Ethiopia. I collected this data in 2011 as part of a PhD project. Twenty-one smallholding farmers selected for the study used 213 of these fields while the remaining (33 fields) were fields adjacent to some of the fields used by the sample farmers. In addition to recording the land use in 2011 for all fields, through interview with the land users the land use types in 1991 and 1974 were identified for 151 and 117 fields, respectively. Major events occurred in 1974 (the socialist military government overthrew the last feudal monarch) and 1991 (the socialist military government was itself overthrown) in Ethiopia have helped trigger the interviewed farmers’ memory of past events. Farmers were able to identify the land use types during the three reference years (2011, 1991 and 1974) for 115 fields. Of the 213 fields used by the 21 farmers, I recorded the coordinates of the boundaries of 208 fields with a hand-held GPS. Similarly, I recorded the coordinates of the boundaries of the 33 fields adjacent to some of the studied fields. Using the coordinates and field notes, I have built two shape files in ESRI ArcMap in 2018 showing these fields (208 and 33). Data set also includes some biophysical features, e.g. location of the fields in relation to forest edges, of the fields. Moreover, the data set provides also the family size as well as the gender, age and educational status of the head of the household of the 21 studied farmers. I have reported detail descriptions of the purpose of this study and methods used to select village and household, and the results of the study in my PhD thesis (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-128537Opens in a new tab). Dataset contains land use types for 246 areas in the Gera district in southwestern Ethiopia. Data consists of GIS files with additional data in excel format.