Land use/ land cover change study of the lower Tapi river basin using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System

Due to the growing nature and being the activity of economic hub, Lower Tapi River Basin is changing regarding its land use scenario. The land use planning must be based on meaningfully crafted visionary action to avoid any kind of haphazard development. This work was done to provide fast, accurate and economical procedure for mapping land use and the land cover of any interested area. Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) may help on large scale for classifying and mapping an image. Recent development in GIS field software tools may be used for the image classification and for performing related functions. Lower Tapi River Basin case is attempted to explore the extent of spatial growth.

Present work is a compilation of two different images from 2015 to 2021 obtained by the USGS earth explore. The objectives of the study were availing two decadal sentinel pictures of Lower Tapi River Basin. Research includes a classification of the images and detection of Land use/Land cover changes in past two decades. The work was on the derivation of five land use classes i.e. urban area, agriculture, fallow land, water body and forest. Land use/land cover maps of the study area were generated using remote sensing and GIS. False Colour Composite (FCC) sentinel images were used as a base for identification. Interactive Supervised classification used for the change detection in vegetation cover.

Forest cover, agricultural land and water bodies in the study area were around 129.64 km², 960.19 km² and 3.92 km² of the total area in the year 2015. In year 2021, forest cover and agricultural land were decreased to 86.74 km² and 700.86 km², respectively and water bodies were increased to 6.39 km².