Land use changes and its impact on biophysical environment: Study on a river bank

Abstract

The rapidly changing land use from agriculture to aquaculture and its emerging adverse impact on various biophysical environments along the Rasulpur River bank, West Bengal, India have been quantified by using Landsat data from 2003 to 2017. The biophysical indices like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), Normalized Difference Bareness Index (NDBaI) and Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) as well as Land Surface Temperature (LST) were estimated to extract the changing relationship between each other’s using Pearson’s correlation coefficient, generalized multiple linear regression (GMLR) model and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) model. Results revealed the decreasing trend of NDVI and SAVI along with increasing trends of NDWI, MNDWI and NDBaI controlled land surface temperature (LST). Hence, both the regression models were well fitted at the significance level of p < 0.01. Moreover, spatial autocorrelation and Getis-Ord-Gi* were used to evaluate the environmental sensitive zone through hot spot analysis. Consequently, some environmental stewardship planning and people’s participation programs were proposed to protect environmental biophysical health and ecosystem services.