Monitoring Land Use And Land Cover Changes Using Geospatial Techniques, A Case Study Of Fateh Jang, Attock, Pakistan

Abstract

Change of land use and land cover (LULC) has been a key issue of natural resource conservation policies and environmental monitoring. In this study, we used multi-temporal remote sensing data and spatial analysis to assess the land cover changes in Fateh Jhang, Attock District, Pakistan. Landsat 7 (ETM+) for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010 and Landsat 8 (OLI/TIRS) for the year 2015 were classified using the maximum likelihood algorithms into built-up area, barren land, vegetation and water area. Post-classification methods of change detection were then used to assess the variation that took place over the study period. It was found that the area of vegetation has decreased by about 176.19 sq. km from 2000 to 2015 as it was converted to other land cover types. The built-up area has increased by 5.75%. The Overall Accuracy and Kappa coefficient were estimated at 0.92 and 0.77, 0.92 and 0.78, 0.90 and 0.76, 0.92 and 0.74, for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015, respectively. It turned out that economic development, climate change and population growth are the main driving forces behind the change. Future research will examine the effects of changing land use types on Land Surface Temperature (LST) over a given time period.