Land use and land cover change in India: A remote sensing & GIS prespective

Land use and land cover change have been among the most important perceptible changes taking place around us. Although perceptible, the magnitude, variety and the spatial variability of the changes taking place has made the quantification and assessment of land use and land cover changes a challenge to scientists. Furthermore, since most of the land use and land cover changes are directly influenced by human activities, they rarely follow standard ecological theories. The Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System has proved to be very important in assessing and analyzing land use and land cover changes. Satellite-based Remote Sensing, by virtue of its ability to provide synoptic information of land use and land cover at a particular time and location, has revolutionized the study of land use and land cover change. The temporal information on land use and land cover helps identify the areas of change in a region. The use of Geoinformatics has enabled us to assign spatial connotations to land use land cover changes, namely, population pressure, climate, terrain, etc which drive these changes. This has helped scientists to quantify these tools and to predict various scenarios. This article gives a overview of the current trends in land use and land cover changes along with two case studies on the same subject, one case study on geospatial LULC change modeling and one on agent based land use and land cover change modeling.