Spatio temporal analysis of urban expansion and its impact on land use land cover: A case study of Guwahati metropolitan area.

This paper presents temporal and spatial dynamics of urban expansion and its impact on the land use land cover (LULC) in Guwahati Metropolitan Area, Indiaby using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing. The LULC changes were detected throughintegration of remotely sensed Landsat imageries and GIS for the year 1991 and 2016. Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) was implemented for automated extraction of built up areas and Maximum Likelihood Supervised Classification and post classification techniques were carried out to examine the LULC changes over a period of 25 years. The growth trend of built uparea and the LULC changes show that there are substantial exchanges of areas between vegetation and built up land along with dense forest loss occurring mainly in the hills and foothills in and around Guwahati mainly due to the need for coping up with substantial increase in population and economic activities. The limited land availability and the confinement of forest areas to the hills has forced the utilizationof higher grounds resulting in huge land use transformation from vegetated land and forests to built up land.