Abstract
Alteration of land cover takes place dramatically because of great forces of natural calamities. Qualitative and quantitative information about these changes are useful for sustainable management of natural resources. Especially coastal areas are prone to land coverage changes due to many reasons, among which natural calamities rank as one of the major factor. Odisha, being located in Eastern part of India, covering 480 km coastal tract is very susceptible to frequent natural catastrophes like cyclone and super cyclone. In this paper, land cover change dynamics were investigated by the combined use of satellite remote sensing and geographical information systems. The main objective of the study was to determine land-cover changes among land cover types in coastal areas of Kendrapara. Landsat ETM+ images of the year 2000 and 2006 were used to gather land cover change data of the coastal belt of Kendrapara district, Odisha. The images were classified using unsupervised classification and a post-classification comparison approach was used in change detection. The results show increase in agricultural areas and other vegetated areas but decrease in water bodies and soil and barren areas.
Highlights
Land cover refers to surface cover on ground which includes vegetation, settlements, water base soil etc
This paper focuses the issue of change in land use/land cover classes and acreage of each class for a coastal village and itsnearbyareas of Odisha
From the outcomes of the analysis it was found that water bodies and agricultural crop areas have increased with 2.81 % and 8.01 % within the period of the year 2000 to 2006 whereas other vegetation and areas of soil and barren have decreased with 6.54 % and 4.27% respectively
Summary
Land cover refers to surface cover on ground which includes vegetation, settlements, water base soil etc. Delineating and mapping land cover is important for global monitoring system, resource management and planning activities. Identification of land cover provides the baseline from which monitoring activities (change detection) can be performed, and provides the ground cover information for baseline thematic maps. More than half of the world’s population live on coastal areas (Hinrichsen,1998). All most all worlds’ coastal areas are exposed to rapid urban growth; increasing population pressure; expansion of major industries. Land use and land cover of the coastal areas are changing dramatically because of natural processes as well as human activities. Land use and/land cover changes have become a central component for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes (Bottomley1998). A lot of land cover and land use change models have been developed for assessing change on land use patterns for different purposes (U.S EPA 2000)
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