Land Use Land Cover Change Detection and Forecasting for Tiruchirappalli City Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Abstract

Land use Land cover (LU/LC) change has taken place in Tiruchirappalli city in Tamil Nadu, India over the past two decades due to induced industrialization and urbanization. In this paper, LU/LC change dynamics were studied by the combined use of remote sensing, geographical information system (GIS) and stochastic modelling technologies. The different land use categories and their spatial and temporal variability in Tiruchirappalli city has been studied over a period of fourteen years (1992-2006), from the analysis of Landsat images for the year 1992, 2001, 2003 and 2006 using ArcGIS 9.3 and ERDAS Imagine 9.1 software. Maximum Likelihood Algorithm was employed to detect the LU/LC types. Based on the results of classified images, the agricultural land coverage area was observed to have reduced from the year 1991 to 2006 by 3.44 %, while the area under settlement increased from the year 1991 to 2006 by 18.54 %. An attempt was made to project the LU/LC change for the next nine years using Markov model. The forecasted results indicated that, the area of urban land would maintain the increasing tendency in the next nine years. The study demonstrates that the integration of satellite remote sensing and GIS was an effective approach for analysing the temporal and spatial pattern of LU/LC change. The further integration of these two technologies with Markov modelling was found to be beneficial in describing and analysing land use change process.

Keywords: GIS, LANDSAT, Land use Land cover, Markov, remote sensing.