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There has been a rapid change in land use which has greatly affected the agricultural production. These has been influenced by the social economical activities which are related to human deeds here on earth while others are associated with nature. The research analyzes how the change in land use has affected the rate of coffee production within Mathira sub-county.
Mathira sub-county has been the largest area producing coffee within the county government of Nyeri. Despite being known from its aspects there has been a decline with the production of coffee in the recent past which could be due to the rapid changes in land use.
The project was based on three main objectives. It characterizes all the land use land cover within Mathira constituency and determines the areas for each class. It also correlates the coffee areas with coffee yields obtained from coffee factories in Mathira. Lastly it predicts the land cover for the year 2030 using Molusce plugin in QGis.
From characterization of landuse land cover, it was determined that coffee areas were decreasing over the years while built-up areas increase. In the year 2000, the coffee plantation covered 22.77%. This value decreased to 21.58% in the year 2005, which again decreased to 20.82% in 2012, then 19.88% in 2015 and lastly 14.76% in 2018. To confirm this data, the coffee areas in all the years were correlated with coffee yields. The correlation coefficient was determined to be 0.9, showing a very high correlation between the two variables. Prediction analysis showed that coffee areas is bound to diminish in future. This is supported by the analysis where the coffee area in year 2030 was predicted to be 11.25%. |
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