Open AccessAssessment And Detection Of Land Cover Changes In The Southern Fringe Of Kolkata Using Remotely Sensed Data
Author(s) -
Sushobhan Majumdar
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geography, environment, sustainability
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.316
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 2542-1565
pISSN - 2071-9388
DOI - 10.24057/2071-9388-2020-65
Subject(s) - geography , land cover , land use , wetland , vegetation (pathology) , physical geography , change detection , population , cartography , built up area , sustainable development , remote sensing , population growth , agriculture , ecology , archaeology , medicine , demography , pathology , sociology , biology
Continual, historical, and precise information about the land use and land cover (LULC) changes of the Earth’s surface is extremely important for any kind of sustainable development program, in which LULC serves as one of the major input criteria. In this study, a supervised classification was applied to five types of Landsat images collected over time (1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2015) that provided recent and historical LULC conditions for the area. Four LULC categories were identified and mapped. Post-classification comparisons of the classified images indicated that the major change consisted of barren land changing into agricultural land. This analysis revealed that substantial growth of built-up areas in the south eastern part of Kolkata over the study period resulted in significant decrease in the area of water bodies, cultivated land, vegetation and wetlands. Urban land transformation has been largely driven by large number of population and high population growth rate with rapid economic and infrastructural development like the extension of metro railway, flyovers and hence huge real estate development.