Land Use/Land Cover Change and Environmental Impact Analysis of Ramgarh-Naudiha Region in Uttar Pradesh, India through Geospatial Technology

Abstract

Rapidly changing LULC scenario with growing population is of great concern in the modern world. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the changes in LULC pattern in Ramgarh-Naudiha region of Sonbhadra district, UP, over 20 years during 1998-2018 using datasets from the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) 5 and Landsat 8 (OLI/TIRS) satellites. LULC map for the chosen period has been generated by unsupervised classification with maximum likelihood algorithm. Results indicate that the study area is vulnerable to such LULC changes due to its sensitive geographic location. It is found that the major changes did happen in agriculture, forest, wasteland and water bodies. Agriculture and Forest areas have decreased by ~2 and 6.56% respectively in the study period. The wastelands had increased fast from 5.08% in 1998 to 18.87% in 2018 at the cost of the forest cover and agricultural land respectively. In 1998, water bodies were 7.49%, whereas, it has decreased to 2.04% in 2018. On the contrary, urban fringe area has grown from 0.33% in 1998 to 0.49% in 2018 especially due to population growth. The present study concludes that this LULC analysis will increase awareness and help in taking necessary action in appropriate land use planning and management.