Evaluation of Land Use/Cover Change and Urban Sprawling Pattern Using Remote Sensing and GIS: A Case Study in Thimphu, Bhutan

Abstract

The urbanisation and multifarious upsurge of infrastructures in Bhutan have caused intense alteration of land cover topographies. These rapid changes undergoing are predominately snow cover, vegetation, water bodies, built-up, barren land, and agricultural land which are commonly called land use/land cover (LULC) change. The current research attempts to analyse concerning temporal and spatial frameworks features to observe the nature of development sprawling processes of Thimphu over 30 years (1990-2020), by using multi-temporal remote sensing data. Landsat 5, 7 and sentinel 2B imageries have been adopted for estimating land use/cover change in Thimphu for the past 30 years. The confusion matrix and Kappa coefficient methods were adopted for the classification accuracy assessment. This is further validated by field visit essentially on water bodies and barren land which were quite perplexing. The paper concludes that the largest proportion of the area (65.97%) in 1990 was under vegetation cover, followed by barren land (31.63%) and the third biggest (1.39%) was under snow cover. The current research will provide significant aid to the planners and architects to understand the pattern of development sprawling in the past and facilitate futuristic mapping the developmental activities.