Spatio-temporal assessment of Margalla hills forest by using LANDSAT imagery for year 2000 and 2018

Abstract

Environmental imbalance due to human activities has shown serious threat to ecosystem and produced negative impacts. The main goal of this study is to identify, monitor and classify temporal changes of forest cover, build up and open spaces in Margalla Hills National Park, Islamabad. Geographic Information Sciences (GISc) and Remote Sensing (RS) techniques has been used for the assessment of analysis. LANDSAT-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) and LANDSAT-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) were utilized for obtaining data of year 2000 and 2018. Temporal changes were evaluated after applying supervised classification and discrimination was analyzed by Per-Pixel based change detection. Results depicts forest cover decrease from 87% to 74% whereas build up has increased from 5% to 7% over the span. Consequences also justify the presence of open land in study area that has been increased from 2% to 7% respectively.