Multitemporal Analysis of Land Use/Cover Changes and Landscape Fragmentation in Murshidabad District of West Bengal, India

Abstract

Rapid population growth, human migration, and commercial activities are changing land use and Land cover at a faster rate. The human being's need and greed to sustain themselves alter the earth's natural environment, and that change affected us. However, poor and unmanageable land conversion led to severe environmental effects. For planning and management purposes, precise information regarding land use and its characteristics is required to ensure the sustainability of the area. The current study uses multi-temporal satellite images to analyze the decadal change from 1991 to 2021. Supervised image classification is performed using the Maximum likelihood classifier. The main goal of this study is to compare post-classification results using change vector analysis and analyze human impact on the environment using FRAGSTAT. Fragstat is a widely used software program designed for analyzing spatial patterns in categorical maps. It is commonly employed in landscape ecology, conservation biology, and land management studies. The primary purpose of Fragstats is to quantify and assess the composition and configuration of patches or landscape elements within a given area. The built-up area increased from 2.57% to 8.41% over the past 30 years, while the agricultural land decreased from 83.51% to 70.05%. It was observed that the density of patches and percentage of landscape reduction over time, the rise in the number of patches for agricultural class from 3570 in 1991 to 10173 in 2021 indicates that spatial diversity is increasing in the class with higher levels of anthropogenic disturbances. Moreover, in landscape-level indices, the number of patch and landscape shape index increases, and a fall in the largest patch index indicate that the landscape is becoming more complicated and fragmented. To achieve the sustainable land-use planning and safeguard natural ecosystems and biodiversity from anthropogenic activities, land-use change maps are utilized as an early warning system.