Application of geospatial techniques for land use land cover change detection in Pairi river subbasin

The Information on spatial and temporal changes of land use and land cover (LULC) is essential for management of agricultural land, water resource and for over all sustainable development agriculture. Here, remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) techniques are used to assess the changes in LULC patterns in Pairi river subasin which is a part of the Mahanadi basin for the periods 2001 to 2021 on decadal basis. Landsat satellite imagery of 30 m resolution for the year 2001, 2011 and 2021 and ArcGIS software were used to identify the changes in LULC. Maximum likelihood supervised classification was used to classify the satellite images. The classification had done using nine LULC class viz. water body, scrub land, barren land, fallow land, forest land, built up, agricultural land, river and canal. This study indicated that in the last 20 years period, agricultural land and built-up areas have significantly increased by 17.60% to 20.69% and 0.86% to 1.76%, respectively whereas forest area decreased from 75.68% to 71. 74% during the study period. The water body area also increased from 1.03% to 1.41% during the period 2001 to 2021. Fallow, barren and scrub land follows the decreasing trend during the study period. Hence, appropriate land management practices may be adopted to prevent the undesirable affects LULC changes on natural resources like soil and water.