Abstract
Urban and peri-urban agricultural practices are degrading throughout the developing world owing to unprecedented urban sprawling and consequent expansion of built-up areas. This study attempted to assess the changing land use/land cover patterns of Kolkata Metropolitan Area, India from 1990 to 2020 with special emphasis on the transformation trajectories of its urban and peri-urban agriculture as a case study using free and open-source software and multi-temporal geospatial database. It also aimed to project the transformation scenario of croplands in 2030 through application of the artificial neural network algorithm of the freely available Modules for Land Use Change Evaluation plugin. Results revealed a persistent spread of built-up areas by engulfing croplands, wetlands, vegetation and water bodies throughout the assessment period. An overall loss of 181.11 sq. km of croplands between 1990 and 2020 was estimated and found to be more prominent in the northern, eastern, and south-eastern parts of the study area. If the existing socio-economic framework and administrative mechanism would prevail as usual, then the projected land use patterns of 2030 would predict a further decrease of 15.46 sq. km in cropland area thereby culminating to a total 37.39% of it original extent since 1990. A theoretical three-stage model of land use conversion was developed from the empirical results as well as field observations and validated with the findings of the projected scenario. It indicated two primary conversion patterns for the study area, viz. (1) natural area to cropland to fallow land and then to built-up, and (2) natural area to fallow land to built-up. Few necessary management measures were suggested to mitigate this persistent loss of croplands and other natural areas.
Highlights
An exaggerated pace of urbanization is leading to incessant conversion of croplands into built-up and other nonfarm urban land uses worldwide at present, along the city fringes [1,2,3]
The area is characterized by many depressions in the form of marshes, shallow wetlands, and ox-bow lakes which are the remnants of the old river channels of Bhagirathi [18]
Four maps of land use/land cover (LULC) of Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA) had been prepared with six classes through supervised classification (Fig. 3)
Summary
An exaggerated pace of urbanization is leading to incessant conversion of croplands into built-up and other nonfarm urban land uses worldwide at present, along the city fringes [1,2,3]. This leads to noticeable environmental degradation in urban and peri-urban zones [4]. The trend is more prominent in several cities of India where the continuous onslaught of the real estate and manufacturing sectors coupled with lacklustre implementation of the legal protective measures had resulted into disappearing greeneries including croplands.
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