LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Basic Concepts of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change
According to (FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), 2000; Gregorio, 2005) land cover refers to the biophysical cover of the earth surface or land for instance vegetation cover such as forest, shrub/bushland, and grassland and water. Whereas land cover can be defined as the attributes of the earth’s land surface covered by vegetation, desert, water bodies like lake, sea, ocean, bare soil and ice (Chrysoulakis et al., 2004; Lambin et al., 2003). Land use is characterized by the arrangements, activities and inputs people undertake in a certain land cover type to produce, change or maintain it (Gregorio, 2005). While land use refers to land is used by humans for different purpose for instance settlement, industrial area, cropping and grazing. According to (Chrysoulakis et al., 2004; Zubair, 2006) land use is the land which employed by human beings for their various needs and exploiting of land cover for different activities like residential and industrial zones, farm and grazing land and mining.
Land-use and land-cover change is therefore the modification of Earth’s surface (both waterbodies and terrestrial areas) through human activities. Land-use and land-cover change is also can be expressed as any biophysical change of land-cover like vegetation cover and waterbodies and improper use of land for different activities for example, for grazing, cropping and irrigation (Quentin et al.,