Retrieval of Land-Use/Land Cover Change (LUCC) Maps and Urban Expansion Dynamics of Hyderabad, Pakistan via Landsat Datasets and Support Vector Machine Framework

Land-use/land cover change (LUCC) is an important problem in developing and under-developing countries with regard to global climatic changes urban morphological distribution. Since the 1900s, urbanization has become underlying cause of LUCC, more than 55% world’s population resides cities. The speedy growth, development expansion centers, rapid inhabitant’s land insufficiency, necessity for manufacture, advancement technologies remain among several drivers LUCC around globe at present. In this study, or sprawl, together spatial dynamics Hyderabad, Pakistan over last four decades were investigated reviewed, based on remotely sensed Landsat images from 1979 2020. particular, radiometric atmospheric corrections applied these raw images, then Gaussian-based Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel was used training, within 10-fold support vector machine (SVM) supervised classification framework. After maps retrieved, different metrics like Producer’s Accuracy (PA), User’s (UA) KAPPA coefficient (KC) adopted accuracy assessment ensure reliability proposed satellite-based retrieval mechanism. Landsat-derived results showed that there increase amount built-up area a decrease vegetation agricultural lands. Built-up only covered 30.69% total area, while it increased reached 65.04% after decades. contrast, continuous reduction land, vegetation, waterbody, barren observed. Overall, throughout four-decade period, portions have decreased by 13.74%, 46.41%, 49.64% 85.27%, respectively. These observed highlight symbolize characteristics “rural transition” socioeconomic modernized city, which open new windows detecting potential land-use laying down feasible future planning strategies.