Identifying Trends in Landuse/Landcover Changes in Hisar Tehsil: A LCM Based Approach

Abstract

Land is a source of all basic human needs, (e.g., agriculture, forest, water supply etc.) which is being continuously depleted by various agents. Urban growth and urbanization are considered as one of the major factors responsible for change in landcover dynamics and depletion of land resources. As compared with other landcover classes such as agricultural land, urban land has smaller area coverage but its impact to the surrounding environment is higher. An attempt, therefore, has been made to acquire reliable and timely spatio-temporal information of Hisar Tehsil of Haryana state to study and predict landcover dynamics. Decadal changes in the landuse pattern of the study area were monitored since 1990. The landcover maps generated after running an Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analysis Technique (ISODATA) unsupervised classification were used to differentiate the landuse classes. Both the built-up areas and water bodies show a gradual increase while the agricultural area marked shrinkage in area. Based on the scenario of landuse change over the years a prediction in the landuse changes for the years 2021 and 2031 was modeled. The predicted land classes lies in close proximity to the actual landuse classes. The Markov model used in the study was able to truly predict the changes in the landuse patterns. The accuracy assessment was done to indicate the reliability of study. Past trends in the landuse changes may predict the future patterns of landuse. Many such models to forecast the spatial and temporal changes in the landuse have been developed. Therefore, it was thought worthwhile to use such models for Indian conditions.

 Keywords: GIS, landuse/landcover changes, land change modeler, urbanization