Change Detection of Land Use/Land Cover in Upper Ganga Canal Command, India, Using Arc-GIS Tools

Abstract

The rapid growth of urban population in India is a cause of concern among the country’s urban and town planners for efficient urban planning. The drastic growth of urban areas has resulted in sharp land use and land cover changes. In recent years, the significance of spatial data technologies, especially the application of remotely sensed data and geographical information system (GIS) has been widely used. The present study investigates the urban growth in Upper Ganga Canal Command using IRS satellite data for the years 1972, 1980, 1992, 2002, and 2011. The five satellite images of 14th November, 1972 to 2002 and 17th November, 2011, path row 146–39 and 40 were acquired from the GLCF website. Supervised classification method is used to classify the urban land use and land cover. The GIS is used to prepare different layers belonging to various land uses identified from remotely sensed data. The analysis of the results shows a drastic increase of built-up area and reduced green cover within the study area boundary limits.

Keywords: urban, land use and cover, change detection, remote sensing, geographical information system