The population settlements in the fast-growing urban world need to be monitored in order to design a sustainable urban habitat. The remote sensing and GIS are considered as an effective monitoring and decision-support tool in urban planning. This study compiles the results of a study undertaken to measure the urban sprawl in Dehradun city, India through cellular automata CA-Markov model. CA-Markov model can effectively be used to study the urban dynamics in rapidly growing cities. Being an effective tool for encoding spatial structures, the information generated by it could be used to predict urban scenarios for sustainable growth. To achieve the goal, the temporal images of LISS IV were used to analyse the spatial pattern of land cover change in the area and the future growth was modeled by applying CA-Markov model. The results clearly suggest that major changes between the periods of 2004 and 2009 occurred in built up classes (about 27%) followed by agriculture (17.7%) and fallow land (10.2%). The projection as predicted using CAMarkov model suggested a value of kappa coefficient = 0.91 which indicates the validity of the model to predict future projections. Modeling suggested a clear trend of various land use classes' transformation in the area of urban built up expansions. It is concluded that RS and GIS can be an effective decision support tool for policy makers to design sustainable urban habitats.Ó 2014 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences.

Uttarakhand is covered with 64.76% of its area under Himalayan forest providing the exquisite biodiversity and differences in climate with a miscellany of flora and fauna. Therefore creates great scope for the development of organic farming in rural areas to boost the rural economies. But organic farming is not very much evolved in this state due to lack of adequate transportation services and other socioeconomic reasons. Remote sensing and GIS can play an important role in the identification of the suitable zones for the development of organic farming in more facile manner. In this paper a methodology is proposed to identify the suitable zones in the state for the development of the organic farming using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geospatial techniques to boost rural economies and promote rural tourism to make self-sustainable villages.This study represents the efficacy of AHP and weighted overlay model for the site suitability analysis of organic farming in the study area. Ó 2015 National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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