Journal of Ecosystem & Ecography
Open Access

Abstract

Land use and land cover change has become a central component in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. Urban expansion has brought serious losses of agriculture land, vegetation land and water bodies. Urban sprawl is responsible for a variety of urban environmental issues like decreased air quality, increased runoff and subsequent flooding, increased local temperature, deterioration of water quality, etc. In this work we have taken Rangareddy District, Gatkesar mandal as case to study the urban expansion and land cover change that took place in a span of 05 years from 2006 to 2011. Remote sensing methodology is adopted to study the geographical land use changes occurred during the study period. Satellite Imagery- IRS1D, LISS-III+PAN FUSED of two different years are taken into consideration. After image pre- processing, un-supervised classification has been performed to classify the images in to different land use categories. Five land use classes have been identified as Urban (Built-up), Water body, Agricultural land, Grassland and Forest. Classification accuracy is also estimated using the field knowledge obtained from field surveys. Information on urban growth, land use and land cover change study is very useful to local government and urban planners for the betterment of future plans of sustainable development of the city. Suggestions were therefore made at the end of the work on ways to use the information as contained therein optimally

Biography

F Khan is pursuing M.Tech Environmental Management from JNTUH and this paper is part of dissertation entitled ?Land use land cover change detection of ghatkesar mandal, ranga reddy district using remote sensing and GIS? under the esteemed supervision of Dr.T.VijayaLakshmi, Asst. Prof., Centre for Environment, IST, JNTUH