Detection of Land Use and Land Cover Change in Jammu District using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

Abstract: Jammu District has under gone a massive change in its land use and land cover in last 30 years. It has grown 2.5 times in its population in past 3 decades and simultaneously the infrastructure supporting the population growth has increased altering the overall land cover. With the growing population the demand for arable land, infrastructure development, land resource management becomes an obligation for effective optimization of resources and policy formulation and implementation. In this research the land use land cover change detection and analysis in last 30 years from 1993 to 2023 is attempted for the first time. The classification is achieved by supervised image classification of Landsat 5 and Landsat 9 Level 1 imagery acquired from USGS. The classification scheme is developed for five classes viz. Water Bodies, Built-Up Area, Agriculture, Barren Land and Forests. Change detected is -3% for water bodies, +5% for built-up area, +29 % for agricultural land, -22% for barren land, -9% for forest cover. The percentages are calculated of the total area. The overall accuracy is maintained at 87% for year 1993 and 78% for year 2023.