Forest Changes in the Ethiopian Highlands

My project is to look at changes in forest cover over a decade in the highlands of Ethiopia. Qualitative assumptions have been made on drastic changes in forest cover with changes in political and land tenure regimes in the country, however there are few quantitative studies to demonstrate these changes. I plan to use Landsat images from the mid 1980’s and another image from the 1990’s to determine, on a coarse scale, the perceived changes during two different political regimes. The general hypothesis to be tested is: Changes and uncertainties in political regime, and subsequent land tenure arrangements in tenure insecure areas leads to significant deforestation.