Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Landuse/Land Cover Around NTPC Using High Resolution Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Land is becoming scarce resource due to population growth and industrialization. Rapid growth of human activities can also be attributed as one of the reasons. Thus, it becomes an important task to regulate land resource for sustainable development and environmental protection. LULC change studies have become a central component in current strategies for managing and planning land resources and monitoring environmental changes. In this paper an attempt has been made to bring out spatio-temporal dynamics of LULC patterns of NTPCRamagundam and its surrounding environment by using multi-temporal satellite data of Landsat-4, IRS P6 LISS-III and IRS 2 LISS-IV and GIS techniques for the years 1984, 2005, 2011, 2015, 2018. The methodology includes base map preparation having features like Road (SH), Rail, Canal, River, Stream, Tanks, Forest boundary and other administrative boundaries from SOI topo sheet and the features digitized are updated on satellite images. Interpretation of study area for LULC feature extraction on satellite imageries of respective years is carried with Nrsc’s standard LULC classification system. Change detection statistics can be generated out of 5 LULC thematic layers obtained and analysed specially with respect to NTPC environs. Results from this study shows the percentage of geographical area occupied by built-up land, agricultural land, forests, wasteland and waterbodies of level-I LULC features were 10.27%, 60.68%, 6.61%, 11.81%, 10.63% respectively in 1984 and were changed into 21.41%, 48.51%, 5.97%, 12.77%, 11.34% respectively in 2018. This analysis shows a rapid growth in built-up land and fall in agricultural land between 1984 and 2018. There is a considerable change in the remaining features from 1984 and 2018.