Land use/land cover change analysis in treated watershed using RS and GIS

Watershed management is a special entity for development of an area. During last four decades a large number of watersheds were treated under various schemes implemented by different Departments and NGOs. Monitoring and evaluation of watershed projects are as important as their implementation. Hence, an attempt was made to study the changes in land use/land cover (LU/LC) in Bino watershed of Uttarakhand to find out the effects of watershed treatment measures and human interference over 30 years (1976–2006) using integrated approach of remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS). The study has been done through RS approach using Survey of India (SoI) toposheet and satellite imageries of Landsat Multi Spectral Scanner satellite image for 1976, a Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite image for 1999 and an Indian Remote Sensing satellite image for 2006 (IRS-1C, LISS-III) and unsupervised classification was employed. GIS software was used to prepare the thematic maps. Ground truth observations were also performed to check the accuracy of the classification. The classified LU/LC images for 1976, 1999 and 2006 have overall accuracy of 89.1, 89.4 and 90.3% with KAPPA statistic of 86.1, 86.3 and 87.7%, respectively. Results revealed that area under agriculture land and waste land increased while area under open forest and water body declined continuously over the study period. Dense forest area increased during the first (1976–1999) period but decreased slightly during the second (1999–2006) period, whereas the magnitude of shape complexity indices increased substantially. The study reveals that there is the need of further watershed treatment or desilting in the upstream of soil conservation measures and water bodies and preventing the expansion of settlements in the area