LAND USE CLASSIFICATION AND LAND COVER ASSESSMENT USING ACCURACY MATRIX FOR DHAMTARI DISTRICT, CHHATTISGARH, INDIA

The land use land cover change monitoring is vital for planning, developing and managing of any region. The main aim of this study is to monitor Land use and land Cover ( LULC) changes of Dhamtari district of Chhattisgarh for the periods of 1999-2004, 2004-2009, 2009-2014, and 2014-2020. Landsat-8 and Landsat-5 data were used to generate LC map. The imageries were then used for supervised classification using maximum likelihood technique to prepare LULC maps. The change map of study area is for a time period of 1999-2020. This change map shows the change of one class to other. Five major classes viz; agriculture, barren land, forest area, urban area and water bodies have been identified. The forest and agriculture class are dominant in the study area. The LULC in the study area has experienced intricate changes over past two decades. The accuracy was assessed using google imageries and field verification, 200 random points were selected to verify the LULC map. The results Shows, agriculture, Forest, Urban area have increased by 25.60% (1037.9Km(2)), 42.60% (1728.2Km(2)), 23.60% ( 958Km(2)) while barren land and water bodies have decreased by 4.80% ( 194.2Km(2)) and 3.50% (141.6Km(2)) respectively. The average changes occurred in each class in last two decade from 1999-2020 are agriculture land 22%, barren land 22%, Forest 38%, urban land 15%, and water bodies changes to 3%. The results from the study will help the policy makers to understand the change trend and land management in the Dhamtari District.