Assessment of land use/land cover changes in Samastipur district of Bihar using RS and GIS
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Date
2021
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DRPCAU, PUSA
Abstract
The assessment and analysis of land use/land cover (LULC) changes are required to identify the land use changes from year to year which plays a critical role in planning and implementation of developmental activities. The present study assesses LULC changes in Samastipur district of Bihar using remote sensing and geographical information system. The inventory map of land resources and water bodies have been prepared using satellite data of the year 2020 and the ground truth data. The LULC maps were prepared using LANDSAT-5 (2000, 2005 and 2010) and LANDSAT-8 (2015 and 2020) images by adopting object based image classification technique. Total five classes of LULC- agriculture land, settlement, natural vegetation, sand/barren land and water-bodies were identified for the present study. Accuracy percentage of the classification was assessed based on the error matrix and kappa coefficient. Assessments of LULC changes were done @ 5 years, @ 10 years and @ 20 years during 2000-2020.
The developed inventory map indicated that the total area of Samastipur district is
290000 ha out of which 284689 ha (98.17%) has been occupied by land resources and 5311 ha (1.83%) by water bodies. The results on LULC indicated that the agriculture land coverage increased at high rate during 2000-2005 and 2005-2010; and after that it is increasing at slow rate. The natural vegetation coverage is continuously decreasing during years 2000-2020 while settlement is continuously increasing during this period with notable increase during 2000-2005 and 2015-2020. In the time interval of 10 years (2000-2010), the agriculture land area increased by 22.17% (41295 ha); natural vegetation area decreased by 38.04% (22905 ha); the water-bodies decreased by 46.69% (3683 ha); sand and barren land decreased by 61.27% (16151 ha) and settlement area increased by 15.62% (1444 ha). Over the next 10 years (2010-2020), area covered by agriculture land, settlement, water-bodies and sand and barren land increased by 18320 ha (8.05%), 4093 ha (38.30%), 1105 ha (26.27%) and 4558 ha (44.65%) respectively while area covered by natural vegetation decreased by 28076 ha (75.24%).
During time interval of 20 years (2000-2020), agriculture land area and settlement area increased by 32% (59615 ha) and 59.91% (5537 ha) respectively while natural vegetation, sand and barren land and water-bodies decreased by 84.66% (50981 ha), 43.98% (11593 ha) and 32.68% (2578 ha) respectively. The analysis of the results indicates that the natural vegetation has decreased at fast rate in the recent years. Therefore, proper attention is required towards stopping of cutting of natural vegetation in the district to save the environment.