Assessment of LULC Changes and Its Impact on Agricultural Landscape in Peri-urban Space of Bolpur Town, West Bengal (India)

Abstract

As the cityscape of large metropolitan cities gets increasingly supersaturated, policymakers and developers are being compelled to transform undeveloped land and the natural landscape of peri-urban areas into urban fabrics. Industrial developers and entrepreneurs’ first choice was the peri-urban spaces where land is readily available for construction without a hassle of complicated legal restrictions; furthermore, government’s supportive policies on infrastructure development may have exacerbated the impacts of urbanisation on the ecological and agricultural areas. After the beginning of the economic liberalisation and more import friendly policies in the early 1990s resulted in massive socioeconomic growth and infrastructure developments untimely led urban land use spread out of the city into the peri-urban area along the major highways. Therefore, this study aimed at quantifying and evaluating the trends of urban growth and how it affects farmland in the peri-urban areas of Bolpur town using an integrated approach of GIS tool and support vector machine (SVM) learning algorithms. Comprehensive LULC maps were generated for four distinct years during a 30-year span using a multi-temporal (1990–2020) Landsat dataset, following that, classified images were validated with actual G.P.S data. Kappa statistics indicate a satisfactory result with more than 86% accuracy for all those images. Observations derived from present study reveal that over the past 30 years a significant change occurred in the LULC; a major portion of agricultural land and forested area was converted into a residential area for developing tourism and township projects.