Analysis of Metropolitan Land Use Classification for Agriculture, Forest, and River Beds: A Case Study of Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

Urbanization has led to tremendous pressure on available land in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. Therefore, proper land planning measures are required to mitigate the effect of urbanization on agriculture, forest, and water bodies. This study illustrates the use of Remote Sensing and GIS to detect the change in the urban sprawl of the Dehradun region during the period 2013-18 and its effect on agriculture, forest, and water bodies. This research work has been performed on the Landsat 8 images. Supervised Classification has been adopted in Landsat-8 images of the study area. Four different land cover classes have been considered in the classification stage. These are Urban, Forests, Agriculture and Vegetation, and Seasonal river beds. The accuracy obtained for both the images after Classification was above 85 % for good change detection results. The Change Detection technique used is the Post Classification Comparison method, which is the Matrix Union method. The study has shown that the built-up area in Dehradun city has expanded from 75.07 square km in 2013 to 105.51 square km in 2018 and 0.26 square km of forest area, 34.40 square km of agricultural land, and 2.56 square km of water beds have been converted into the built-up area in 5 years. The increase in the built-up area from 2013 to 2018 is 40.54 %.