EVALUATION OF LAND USE AND LAND COVER CHANGE USING REMOTE SENSING AND GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS: A CASE STUDY IN VIKARABAD DISTRICT, TELANGANA, INDIA

The study and evaluation of natural resources in any part of the world has recently become increasingly reliant on remote sensing as a direct adjunct to professional fields. It's a common misconception that the three types of anthropogenic land change—land use and land cover—are all the same. Land use is typically influenced by human, socioeconomic, and political factors, while land cover is simply the biophysical surface of the earth. Using a Geographic Information System (GIS) in conjunction with Remote Sensing (RS) is a powerful method for studying shifts in land use and land cover. Land use and land cover property changes in geo-registered multi-temporal remote sensing data can be determined through a process called digital change detection. Recent government policies have sought to strike a balance between the need to encourage rural development and ecological stability, so this study used LISS-4 and cartosat-1 imageries to examine waterbodies, wastelands, Agriculture, Forest lands, and built-up areas in the Vikarabad district. Maximum Likelihood was used to categorise the images in ERDAS 2014, and ArcGIS was used to create the maps. Built-up areas (29.97 sq. km), forests (80.85 sq. km), bodies of water (14.10 sq. km), agricultural land (781.94 sq. km), and wastelands (144.66 sq. km) were the types of land use/land cover found to have undergone the most significant changes during the study period. Conclusions from this study confirm the feasibility of remote sensing and GIS modelling for land use/land cover detection utilising multi-temporal images.