The study of the Landuse/Landcover change in Sirsa River Basin, Himachal Pradesh Using Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Sirsa River Basin, a tributary of Sutlej River that flows through Himachal Pradesh and
Punjab has witnessed changes in land use owing to significant growth of population and
industrial expansion in Himachal Pradesh. Baddi town in Solan district has emerged as a
major industrial hub in the last two decades. In the present study an attempt is made to trace
the land use land cover change in the Sirsa river basin during 1989-2009 using Landsat data.
Since the ultimate objective of delineating land use land cover was to study its impact on the
hydrological characteristics of the study basin (not discussed in the present paper) river
basin has been chosen as a unit of study and only the results of land use land cover change
at the basin level have been incorporated in this paper. Landsat TM data of 1989 and 2009
and Landsat ETM+ data of 1999 have been used in this study. Supervised classification using
maximum likelihood algorithm followed by post classification readjustment of classes through
recode function and change detection have been performed in GIS environment. Also an
accuracy assessment using Kappa coefficient has been done to assess the accuracy of the
results. Significant changes in land use land cover have been observed. While on one hand
there has been a significant reduction in area under dense & open forests by 16% each and
barren land by 50%, built up area has sporadically increased by a whooping 1500% during
period under study. The overall accuracy and kappa coefficients(k) for 2009 image are
85.19% and k= 81.77% whereas for 1989 and 1999 the corresponding values are 61.48 %,
k= 52.77 and 62.22 %, k= 53.60.