LAND USE/LAND COVER CHANGE DETECTION IN GIRNAR WILDLIFE SANCTUARY- JUNAGADH

Abstract

As the time plays an important role in leading the life processes and its surroundings, this research work presented about the Land use/Land cover changes in Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary of Junagadh, situated in the Gujarat State of India between the year 1996, 2008 and 2017. Remote sensing and GIS have been used to describe different features of the study area. A supervised signature extraction with the maximum likelihood algorithm was employed to classify the digital data of IRS 1D georeference and merged LISS III for land use/land cover mapping for the year 1996, 2008, and 2017. This work carried out to get understanding of land-cover changes in last twenty years in the Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary areas. As change detection analysis is a major part of this study, it shows that some areas are increasing more than other classes mainly the forest area had been increased followed by barren land while other areas like scrub land decreases subsequently. This habitat change lead to fluctuation in the dispersion of lions in the area with the course of changing resource availability.