Impact Assessment of Land Use Change Detection on the Environment of Ahmedabad District, Gujarat, India using Supervised Classification In GIS

Abstract

Landcover is important for examining land use patterns and helping in the prediction of future sustainable land management and environment conservation. This land use patterns shows more turbulence in urban areas where activities like the human influences and deforestation which affects the environment severely, are more frequent. This study takes up one of such area named Ahmedabad district that is situated in Gujarat, India. The land use and land cover (LULC) of Ahmedabad has changed in many ways. In this investigation, LULC variations were identified and measured using remote sensing (RS). These changes have been considered over thirty years of period. The Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images are used as the sources. The supervised classification method using Maximum Likelihood Classification is used to classify LULC types. The study shows that area of built-up land, Fallow land, Shrub land, Water bodies increased by 1.7%,13%,0.8%,0.4% respectively and area of Cropland, Waste-land decreased by 15.6% and 0.1% respectively. The LULC changes in the study area were subjected to urbanization, population growth, social economic growth and climate change. The results clearly shows that the influence of landuse change is not in the favour of environment and vegetation. These variations were ascribed to factors such as urbanization, the population increase, social-economic expansion and environment disbalance.