Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection and Urban Sprawl Analysis of Vijayawada City Using Multitemporal Landsat Data

ABSTRACT Land use and land cover change has become a central component in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. Urban expansion has brought serious losses of agriculture land, vegetation land and water bodies. Urban sprawl is responsible for a variety of urban environmental issues like decreased air quality, increased runoff and subsequent flooding, increased local temperature, deterioration of water quality, etc. In this work we have taken Vijayawada city as case to study the urban expansion and land cover change that took place in a span of 36 years from 1973 to 2009. Remote sensing methodology is adopted to study the geographical land use changes occurred during the study period. Landsat images of TM and ETM+ of Vijayawada city area are collected from the USGS Earth Explorer web site. After image pre-processing, un-supervised and supervised image classification has been performed to classify the images in to different land use categories. Five land use classes have been identified as Urban (Built-up), Water body, Agricultural land, Barren land and Vegetation. Classification accuracy is also estimated using the field knowledge obtained from field surveys. The obtained accuracy is between 73 to80 percent for all the classes. Change detection analysis shows that Built-up area has been increased by 372.28%, agricultural area has been decreased by 65.16% and barren area reduced by 60.98%. Information on urban growth, land use and land cover change study is very useful to local government and urban planners for the betterment of future plans of sustainable development of the city.