1Ph. D. Scholar, Department of Irrigation & Drainage, Engineering College of Technology, G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology, Pantnagar-263145 (Udham Singh Nagar), Uttarakhand, India
2Professor, Department of Irrigation & Drainage, Engineering College of Technology, G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology, Pantnagar-263145 (Udham Singh Nagar), Uttarakhand, India
3Professor, Department of Soil and Water Conservation, Engineering College of Technology, G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology, Pantnagar-263145 (Udham Singh Nagar), Uttarakhand, India
Online published on 8 May, 2017.
Land use and land cover change is digitally detected by using remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) techniques. In the present study, theland use and land cover changein the Gagas river valley watershed is quantitatively analyzed. To find the change from 1965 to 2008, Survey of India (SOI) toposheets of the year 1965 and LISS III 2008-year data have been used. Supervised classification method with maximum likelihood technique has been used in ERDAS and ArcGIS softwares to categorize the images into three classes, viz., forest, agriculture and barren land. During the last four decades, it was found that due to afforestation in the Gagas river valley watershed the forest cover has been increased by about 8.4% (or 2.20 km2) and the agricultural and barren land have decrease by 0.13% (0.164 km2)and by 7.3% (3.864 km2), respectively.
Land use, Land cover, Topography, Remote sensing, GIS
