Satluj Floodplain: Patterns of Landscape Transformation

Abstract

Systematic appraisal of the natural and cultural aspects of the Punjab Satluj floodplain shows the foundations of landscape transformation. This chapter reconstructs the historical pattern and trends of land use and land cover change with underlying proximate causes. This shows the vector and magnitude of the Human-Environment relationship. Land cover to land use ratios were calculated to prepare a statistical base for the Human-Environment relationships. During the early twentieth-century natural land cover was prominent on this floodplain area. This continued until the mid-twentieth century when the land cover to land use ratio was 64:36. In 1975, the land cover to land use ratio was 54:46. This changed to 12:88 in 1989 and this pattern continued for succeeding years with ratios of 8:92, 7:93 and 6:94 for 2000, 2005 and 2011, respectively. These changing patterns and trends clearly depict two phases of transformation. The first phase in the early to mid-twentieth century is nature-dominated. The second phase, observed in late twentieth to early twenty-first century period and continuing to date, is human-dominated. A landscape transformation matrix and change detection maps were prepared in the geospatial environment to explain the trends and patterns of land use and land cover change. A pixel-wise gain-loss algorithm was used to identify and measure land use and land cover change for the selected time period in association with underlying local to regional level causes.