Land Use Land Cover Changes Using Remote Sensing and GIS Technique: A Case Study of Navsari District, Gujarat

Land use affects land cover and changes in land cover affect land use so the Land use and Land cover change has become a central component in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring changes. Change detection with application of remotely sensed data made possible to study the changes in land cover in less time, at low cost and with enhance accuracy in association with Geographical Information System (GIS) that provide suitable platform for data analysis, update and retrieval. It is very useful because of its synoptic view, repetitive coverage and real time data acquisition. The present study illustrates the land use/land cover changes from 2000 to 2011 of Navsari district in Gujarat. Two time (January, 2000 and 2011) Landsat satellite imageries (TM) were acquired from United States Geological Survey (USGS). The unsupervised classification methodology has been employed using the software ERDAS imagine 2013. In the present analysis images of the study area were categorized into eight different classes namely Built up area, Forest, Orchards including other vegetation, Agriculture field with crops, Open field without crops/vegetation, Water bodies, marshy area and barren land to highlights the changes of the land use pattern. It was also found that the overall classification accuracy is more than 80 percent where as the overall kappa statistics is more than 0.74 per cent for both the years.