English

Abstract

# , UGC-JRF (Geography) *, India. ABSTRACT: The knowledge of Land cover/Land use change pattern is very handy to get into the reality of anthropogenic pressure and dynamics of demography of a given area. For this purpose change detection technique is widely used to assess the driving forces of the changes. With only 11% of urban population Bihar is the least urbanized state of India (Census 2011) and being the capital and largest city of Bihar Patna is facing unprecedented burden of urban agglomeration. Therefore this study is aimed at understanding the land cover and land use change pattern in Patna Municipal Corporation area in last quarter century. Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) are now providing new tools to monitor these fast changes. Landsat satellite images for the two base years 1989 and 2014 have been used for this study. Softwares like Google Earth Pro, GRgarmin, Erdas Imagine and ArcMap have been incorporated to prepare thematic map particularly for Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC). Land cover classification was done with the help of survey of India toposheet and satellite images, ground referencing was also done to check the accuracy of the classification. The results of this study were outstanding. The urban built-up area has nearly doubled in the past 25 years, water body has nearly halved while the forest cover has definitely increased. Fallow land decreased due to conversion to settlement and built-up area. Similarly agriculture land has also decreased considerably for the same reason.