Mulugeta, Solomon (PhD)Jeba, Negasa2018-07-032023-11-192018-07-032023-11-192017-06http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/12345678/5894The title of this thesis is “Monitoring urban expansion and suitability analysis for residential housing by using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) the case of sululta town ”which is to examine rate of expansion of land use- land cover (LULC) classes such as cultivation land, Vegetation, settlements, Grassland and Bare land in thirty years by fifteen years interval which is 1986, 2001, 2016 as well as to indicate a suitable residential housing for future planning purpose. For change detection and residential housing suitability analysis integrated methodologies such as data collection, preprocessing, classification, post classification, accuracy assessment were used by application software such as ERDAS EGIME, ArcGIS, excel, etc. and GIS and Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques and tools supported the processes. The primary data such as satellite Google image of TM 1986, 2001, and 2016 as well as GPS Google map, Field Observation, FGD, and the secondary data were widely used from different sources. The result of change detection analysis revealed that the area has shown a remarkable land Cover/land use changes in general LULC classes such as settlements, cultivation land, vegetation, grassland and open area cover. When settlements increased cultivation land, and vegetation land were decreased rapidly in general. Others were Grass land classes which in 1986 where as in 2001 decline by 20.47% and in 2016 it rapidly increased by 30.30% in study area. Bare land were increased in each three study years which were constituted 0.58% in 1986, and 62.47ha 1.40% and 228.80ha 5.12% in 2001 and 2016 respectively. Suitable residential areas were selected for future urban planning purpose by considering factors such as LULC, road Proximity, Geology, Slope value, river, soil types, and population density. By using these factors the results indicate that the very suitable sites has an area value which accounts 131.9ha (3 %) and followed by moderately suitable site which accounts 1551.8ha (34.7%) while marginally suitable area accounts 2731.2ha (61%) and not suitable lands of study area constitutes 55.6ha which is 1.3%. The problem of sululta town rapid expansion of urban land is directly linked with the activity of man such as population pressure dynamics (natural increasing and migration), and the socio-economic factors such as expansion of investments activities. In order to overcome the problem and effectively manage the town corrective measures had been Suggested which can be implemented both in the short term and long term time for intended bodiesenGeography and Environmental StudiesThesis