Land Use Land Cover Change Detection & Urban Sprawl Study: A Case Study on Shimla Tehsil, Himachal Pradesh, India

Land is the most important natural resource containing soil, water, flora & fauna involving total ecosystem. Mapping of Land use and Land cover change is essential for a wide range of applications such as landslide and erosion control, land planning etc. In this research land use change and urban sprawl has been studied for period of 37 years (1980-2017) using remote sensing and GIS techniques in Shimla Tehsil, Himachal Pradesh. The images are layer stacked and supervised classification technique is adopted to the LANDSAT images between 1980 to 2017. Image classification is carried out using Level 1 NRSC Land use classification system. The acquired output is reclassified and change detection was obtained for every consecutive images and overall changes were acquired by comparing 1980 and 2017 satellite imageries. Accuracy assessment was carried out for the year 2017. 100 random reference points were generated from the classified image of 2017 and cross-correlation has been carried out against the unsupervised classification of the same temporal data. Overall classification accuracy of the image is 92% with kappa statistics of 0.87. Change detection was carried out between the year 1980 and 2017. The results obtained indicates a greater change in the growth and declination of forest cover in the study area. Forest cover reduced from 81.58% in 1980 to 60.77% in 2017. Same way Built-up land has increased from 3.59% to nearly 13.64% in the year 2017. Agriculture practice has also increased from 1.91% to 16.51% in the year 2017. Slope area that represents the barren land in the study area is reduced from 12.9% to 9.09% in 2017.