Monitoring and Impact Assessment of Land Use Change on Environment in Burewala, Punjab through Geo-Informatics

Abstract

Urbanization, migration and growth of commercial centers across the world have made global environment vulnerable to harmful noise levels. The worst impacts of land use change on environment are manifold in Pakistan as there is no proper implementation of environmental laws. The present research focused on the impact of land use on environment of Burewala, which is one of the badly affected cities of Pakistan due to growth of new colonies that are resulting in unchecked noise levels. The land use change of Tehsil Burewala between 1999, 2009 and 2014 was examined with the help of satellite imageries from Landsat TM, ETM+ and OLI sensors. Land use change detection based on remote sensing data is an efficient way of obtaining information for several decision making and support systems and works meaningfully as a research and analysis tool. It gives comprehensive information about the urban development of an area. Four major land use classes are identified including agricultural land, built up, bare soil and water bodies. A method of post classification comparison for change detection is used to detect the changes in land use. The results show a significant change in agricultural land and built-up area. Agricultural land has depleted by almost 14%, mainly owing to increase in built up area. It is concluded that study area is under development phase due to which it is experiencing a gradual increase in built up land through different years including infrastructure as well. Noise pollution in general has increased over the years.