Monitoring land use change and its drivers in Delhi, India using multi-temporal satellite data

Abstract

Urbanization is the primary driver of Land Use/ Land Cover (LULC) changes throughout the world. It is arguably the most dramatic and prevalent form of irreversible land transformation. In a fast growing city like Delhi, land use changes are tremendous. Therefore, it is imperative to analyze the driving forces of such change. Along with Delhi, the South West District of Delhi has been chosen for a comparative study of LULC change from 1977 to 2014. Landsat and Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite scenes were used to perform both supervised and unsupervised classification and an overall accuracy of over 90 % was achieved for all the years. In Delhi, net percent change from 1977 to 2014 was found to be ?30.61 % for built-up area, -22.75 % for cultivated area, -5.31 % for dense forest, -2.76 % for wasteland and ?2.41 % for road/rail network. No major net percent change was seen in open forest, scrubs/degraded forest, plantations and river/ waterbody. The LULC results provide evidence of relationship between built-up area, agricultural land and wasteland over the past four decades. The effect of economic reforms of 1991 has manifested itself as a change in LULC. Overall it illustrates a characteristic picture of LULC change and its dynamics.

Land-Air Interactions over Urban-Rural Transects Using Satellite Observations: Analysis over Delhi, India from 1991–2016

“…Since there is no availability of Landsat thermal data prior to 1990, LULC data of three years-1993, 2006, and 2014, over Delhi is acquired from Jain et al [39]. This 30m spatial resolution dataset comprises of nine categories of LULC, namely: respectively, for all of the considered variables in the study.…”

“…In lieu of this, spatial LULC changes could not be plotted on the complete stretch of both transects. Also, as many micro-scale land use fluctuations are observed along both transects from the high spatial resolution (30 m) LULC maps that were acquired from Jain et al [39], up-scaling of the original dataset to 250 m using the maximum likelihood classification approach is performed. This was necessary in order to make the local scale differences in LULC class distribution (along both transects and within the three time periods) in the graphs to be clearly visible to the reader.…”

“…Over the course of the past four decades, more than 30% land area in Delhi, otherwise allotted to other land uses has been converted to built-up area. Thus, the gross percentage of built-up area in the city, in 2014, amounted to approximately 40% [39]. Figure 1a-c shows the qualitative metadata representing LULC changes over the years inside the administrative boundary of Delhi.…”

Past and Future Trajectories of Farmland Loss Due to Rapid Urbanization Using Landsat Imagery and the Markov-CA Model: A Case Study of Delhi, India

“…The Delhi metropolitan area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in India, was selected as the study site in this research ( Figure 1). The study area is also referred to as the National Capital Region (NCR) of India, a coordinated planning region encompassing the entire National Capital Territory of Delhi and several districts surrounding it from the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan [58]. According to the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, the NCR had a total population of around 45 million in 2017, covering an area of 34,144 km 2 .…”

Groundwater flow modeling for impact assessment of port dredging works on coastal hydrogeology in the area of Al-Wakrah (Qatar)

“…Urbanization occupies a puzzling position in country development and growth, global economic development, energy consumption, natural resource use, and human wellbeing (McDonald et al 2011(McDonald et al , 2014Uddameri et al 2014;Mondal et al 2015;Pandey and Joshi 2015;Jain et al 2016). In the 21st century, urbanization has experienced strong growth, especially in coastal regions.…”