Land use land cover change detection and monitoring of urban growth using remote sensing and GIS techniques: a micro-level study

Accurate information on the rate of land-use pattern changes and urban expansion is essential for the sustainable development and management of natural resources. The rapid urban growth is a major challenge for local government and urban planners in small cities of India due to an insufficient database and inadequate analysis of chaotic urban expansion. The present paper has evaluated the land use/land cover change (LULCC) dynamics of the Barrackpore Subdivision area, India using remote sensing data and utilized the urban growth. Multi-temporal Landsat images with the maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) method were applied to generate the land use land cover maps. The spatiotemporal changes were performed by the “from-to” change matrix identifier to study land transformation. LULCC matrix demonstrated that vegetation cover, agricultural/cropland, wetland, and water bodies have decreased area under 23%, 7%, 6%, 1.7%, while the area under built-up and fallow lands have increased by 32.2% and 6.3% during 1972–2016. The results also revealed marked variation in the growth of built-up areas. The positive correlation between population and built-up land growth indicated that the impact of population pressure has contributed to faster growth of built-up land in the study area. The study calls for policies for proper land use management and sustainable urban development.