Effects of integrated land management, landscape position and land-use types on soil physicochemical properties, discharge, species richness and carbon stock in Geda watershed, north Shewa, Ethiopia

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2020 in the subject Environmental Sciences, grade: A, Addis Ababa University, course: Environmental Science, language: English, abstract: This research is aimed at exploring the changes in indicators of ecosystem services associated with integrated land management practices and generating information and data from agricultural landscapes. The specific objectives are to evaluate changes in selected soil physicochemical properties of the treated site taking the neighboring control site as a base, to quantify the change in water discharge due to integrated land management practices, to assess plant species richness in the watershed and compute changes due to integrated land management practices, to determine the plant biomass production and carbon stock of the watershed associated with integrated land management practices. This thesis is organized in five chapters. The first chapter provides general background information followed by the research problem, justification of the study, research objectives, hypotheses and research questions. The second chapter is a review of relevant literatures that gives existing evidences on the severity of land degradation, rehabilitation efforts and outcomes of rehabilitation works in Ethiopia, and the third chapter is the materials and methods section that begins with a description of the study area and explanations the research methods. Chapter four presents results and discussion of each research objective which are published in or submitted to peer-reviewed scientific journals and manuscripts under preparation. Chapter five provides the conclusions and recommendations of the research.