WITHDRAWN: Urbanization and Land-Use change in the hill town of Nainital

Abstract

Abstract The current study shows the effects of rapid increasing urbanization on land use change / cover by humans due to technological progress in a tourism city situated in the central mountain range (central) of Uttarakhand province (India). This work tried to investigate the land utilization/land cover changes compared with the help of Google Earth from the year 2006 to 2019. Images of a different era are used as a base map to develop land utilization/cover. The study area is classified to 5 different classes as Open space, agriculture-land, Vegetation, Water -bodies & Built-up area for carrying out the study. The results shows that during the last fourteen years there is a significant decrease of Open space, Vegetation, Agricultural Land about 19% (i.e., 0.03 sq.km), 22% (i.e., 1.83 sq.km) and 18% (i.e.,0.03 sq.km) respectively and the built-up area of the Nainital town has been raised for approx 68% (i.e., 1.89 sq.km).This clearly demonstrates the continuous development and drastic land utilization/ land cover changes in the last 14 yrs in the town resulting urbanization which leads to decrease in open space, vegetation and agricultural land.