A spatio-temporal study of land use land cover change detection using GIS and remote sensing techniques

Land resources in India are under severe pressure and it is widely believed that marginal lands are being brought under cultivation. The extent of such changes needs to be known for better land use planning decisions. The present study illustrates the spatio-temporal dynamics of land use land cover of Nagjhari watershed in Bhatkuli block of Amravati, Maharashtra. Multi-temporal high resolution of Sentinel and Landsat satellite data were used to identify the significant positive and negative Land use land cover changes over a decade of 2007 to 2017. From 2007 to 2017, the ‘habitation’ class increased by 34% due to increasing population pressure. There was a decrease in ‘wasteland’ by 10.3%, while the area under ‘agriculture’ decreased by approximately 4.7% because of the increased area under ‘habitation’ and ‘water body’ at Nagjhari watershed. The biggest change occurred in land use class ‘water body’ increased sharply from 2013–17 by 62.7 per cent due to consequence of state policy of watershed development that was implemented after 2014. The forest class recorded maximum loss (18.3%) due to increasing population maximum land converted into habitation. The study shows overall classification accuracy as 85.46% and kappa coefficient (K) of 0.85. Kappa coefficient indicated that land use land cover assessment from remote sensing data show the best accuracy. These finding will help in deciding land use policy for future and its impact on land management of the watershed.