Environmental Assessment of Land Use Land Cover Using Remote Sensing and GIS: A Case Study of Khirthar National Park

Abstract

National Park area is a natural reserve with an outstanding beauty having rich biodiversity, natural eco-system and sustainable environment is a gift from nature to conserve. It is extremely important to monitor the sustainability of National Park by extracting land use land cover change information over the period of time using satellite imagery which is the main application of change detection. The aim of this research study is to assess the land use land cover change at Khirthar National Park by acquiring multispectral Land sat satellite imagery to detect decadal information from 1992 to 2019 using supervised classification Maximum Likelihood classifier. The Land sat satellite data used in this research study was almost of the summer season to assess land use land cover change using supervised classification Maximum Likelihood Classifier and results showed increasing trend in agriculture while decreasing trend in natural vegetation at Khirthar National Park which is a clear indication of increasing anthropogenic activities. The supervised classification Maximum Likelihood Algorithm used to detect land use land cover change at Khirthar National Park results overall accuracy in the year 1992, 2000, 2010 and 2019 was 99.7446%, 99.4536%, 99.6495% and 96.7530% while the kappa statistics results achieved in the year 1992, 2000, 2010 and 2019 was 0.9951, 0.9879, 0.9648 and 0.9503. These increasing human activities will not only disturbs the ecology of National Park but also will impact on the local flora and fauna of the park, therefore it is highly recommended to prevent further loss of biodiversity, natural eco-system and the sustainable management for such natural heritage.