Analysis of Land Use/Land Cover Change Detection Using Remote Sensing and GIS of Fatehgarh Nau Abad Village, Bathinda, Punjab

Abstract

Most of the Indian population is residing in villages to meet their basic necessities by cultivating agriculture as their main occupation. Land witnesses changes due to population increase and socio-economic activities, along with showing the sphere of influence of an urban centre on the nearby areas with the passage of time. As land use/land cover is dynamic in nature so, it becomes very important to understand how villages have changed and are changing its land use/land cover pattern at the micro-level. This research paper applied the potentiality of Remote Sensing and GIS to map, detect and quantify spatio-temporal land use/land cover changes by using the satellite images of Land sat (TM) of 1988, 1998 and high resolution images of 2008 and 2018 downloaded from Google Earth. The study was carried out in the village namely Fatehgarh Nau Abad of Bathinda District in Punjab. The different land use and land cover maps were prepared to analyze change detection of land use and land cover for the 4 distinct years covering the time period of 30 years, i.e. 3 decades. The result shows the decadal changes of land cover that the area under built up has increased from 16 (2.78%) to 39.51 (6.8%) in ha on non-built up land but there were also interchange of land between different land use and land cover categories in the study area. The developed spatial data base at the village level can be useful for rural planning, agriculturalists, and natural resource management.