Monitoring land use changes associated with urbanization in the upper Bhima basin, Maharashtra, India

摘要

Urbanization is the most dramatic form of irreversible land transformation which occurs due to various anthropogenic activities. Multi-temporal Landsat images acquired from different sensors like MSS, TM and ETM+ between 1972-2009 as well as digital elevation dataset is used to study the influence of urbanization on its surrounding land use/cover pattern in the upper Bhima basin. An object based standard nearest neighbor (NN) classification technique is employed for precise classification of various land use classes in the basin. The study revealed that rapid built up area expansion driven by population growth, demand for water from city region leads to construction of new dams in high rainfall region and mass conversion of waste land to agricultural land are the major changes being noticed in the basin due to urbanization.