Assessment And Detection Of Land Cover Changes In The Southern Fringe Of Kolkata Using Remotely Sensed Data

Sushobhan Majumdar

doi:10.24057/2071-9388-2020-65

Abstract

Continual, historical, and precise information about the land use and land cover (LULC) changes of the Earth’s surface is extremely important for any kind of sustainable development program, in which LULC serves as one of the major input criteria. In this study, a supervised classification was applied to five types of Landsat images collected over time (1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2015) that provided recent and historical LULC conditions for the area. Four LULC categories were identified and mapped. Post-classification comparisons of the classified images indicated that the major change consisted of barren land changing into agricultural land. This analysis revealed that substantial growth of built-up areas in the south eastern part of Kolkata over the study period resulted in significant decrease in the area of water bodies, cultivated land, vegetation and wetlands. Urban land transformation has been largely driven by large number of population and high population growth rate with rapid economic and infrastructural development like the extension of metro railway, flyovers and hence huge real estate development.

Highlights

Urbanization is an inexorable process due to economic development and rapid population growth of an area
The population of urban areas is expected to exceed 60% by 2030, with 90% of the projected increase occurring in low income countries i.e. developing or under developed countries, which have urban settlements that are growing five times the rate of those in developed countries.The rapid changes of land use and cover, in the developing countries, are often characterized by rapid urban growth, land degradation, or the transformation of agricultural land to shrimp farming ensuing huge cost to the environment (Sankhala and Singh 2014)
The land use pattern which were categorized into four classes for the year are listed in Table 3 and shown in Fig. 2A total of 49.26 Sq.km. of land area was estimated for this municipality after the supervised classification

Summary

Introduction

Urbanization is an inexorable process due to economic development and rapid population growth of an area. Urban growth is the movement of residential areas or commercial areas to the semi urban or rural areas It has long been considered a sign of regional economic sustainability. Determining the trend and the rate of land cover conversion are necessary for the development and planning in order to develop rational land use policy. For this purpose, the temporal dynamics of remote sensing data can play an important role in monitoring and analyzing land cover changes

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion