Application of Remote Sensing and GIS in Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection: A Case study of Gagas Watershed, Kumaun Lesser Himalaya, India

Digital change detection is a technique that helps in providing new tools for studying land use and land cover change. Using remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) techniques, the present study includes the quantitative analysis of land use and land cover change in one of the non-glacial-fed watershed of Kumaun Lesser Himalaya, India, viz., the Gagas watershed. The Survey of India topographic sheet of the year 1965 and LISS III satellite data for the year 2008 have been utilised to quantify the change from 1965 to 2008, i.e., over a period of 43 years. Supervised classification methodology has been employed using maximum likelihood technique in ERDAS 9.3 and mapped using ARC GIS to categorise the images into three classes, viz., forest, agriculture and barren land. The results indicate that during the last four decades, due to afforestation, the forest cover in the Gagas watershed has been increased by about 8.5% (or 43.62 km2) and the agricultural and barren land have decrease by 0.14% (6.69 km2) and by 7.2% (36.93 km2), respectively.