Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection in the Bhavani Basin of India through Remote Sensing Approach

Abstract

Using remote sensing data to detect changes in land use and land cover (LULC) is a valuable source of information for various decision support systems. Land use and land cover identification data was used to analyse land conservation, sustainable development, and water resource management. This research aims to determine how the Bhavani basin land use and land cover have changed over the period of time. Land cover changes were detected using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) 30 m resolution images in the GIS environment and with image processing techniques for the four years 1999, 2007, 2014, and 2020. The differences in the landuse and land cover classes are described using ERDAS imagine version 2015 and ARC GIS software. The four land cover classes viz. water body, built-up land, barren land, and vegetation were used to classify the region. The accuracy evaluation was assessed separately using the kappa coefficient after carefully examining the image pre-processing and classification. The overall accuracy in the basin was found to be 83.23%, 86.45%, 85.83%, and 88.75 % with a kappa coefficient of 0.79, 0.81, 0.87, 0.85 for the years 1999, 2007, 2014, and 2020 respectively. The Bhavani basin is mostly covered by barren and vegetation. According to the findings, the basin's built-up area has risen by 1.5 percentage to 3.5 percentage in the last 20 years. The increase in the vegetation area and reduction in the barren area may lead to low soil erosion.