Huge number of settlement programs and unscientific agricultural expansion cause the reduction of forest cover. Thus, this study was conducted to detect the impacts of settlement and agricultural expansion on forest cover change in West Gondar zone, between the year1980 – 2020. To detect the impacts of settlement and agricultural expansion on forest cover; Landsat TM of 1980, ETM+ of 2000 and OLI-TIRS of 2020 were used to generate the land cover map of the study area. In addition to the detection; Field observation, focus group discussions, key informant interviews and remotely sensed data were used to analyze the cause, agent, management options, patterns and rate of land use land cover change. For the purpose of land-use change analysis; preprocessing, post-classification and change detection comparison were employed. Hence, the land use analysis result showed that the dramatic increment of farm land from 4962.711km2 (31.88 %) in 1980 to 8068.38km2 (51.8 %) in 2020 with an annual increment rate of 155.28 km2, whereas forest cover decreased from 9030.23km2 (58.01%) in 1980 to 6,123.95km2 (39.3 %) in 2020 with annual decreasing rate of -72.66km2 per annum. In order to check the precision of land use classification, the accuracy assessment of the classification was employed. Therefore, the accuracy assessment result for 2020 maps showed that an overall accuracy (85.81%) and kappa coefficient was (81%) for the classifications. The reason for the increment of agriculture and the decline of forest cover was due to huge number of settlements, unscientific large-scale agriculture expansion, charcoal production, fuel wood collection, house construction and road construction with the facilitator of investor, settler, resident and per time contractor were the major reasons. To overcome such problems: forest conservation approach should be participatory, large-scale farmers should include forest conservation practice in their agricultural license and strong awareness about the positive impacts of forest and the negative impact of deforestation should be delivered to the community of the study area