Monitoring of Land Use/Land Cover Changes and Urban Sprawl in Peshawar City in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: An Application of Geo- Information Techniques Using of Multi-Temporal Satellite Data

This paper presenting land use and land cover changes in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa city of Peshawar, Pakistan, this study is the first to use satellite remote sensing data to examine the 17 years land cover changes in the city of Peshawar between 1999 and 2016. Particularly, it employed maximum likelihood classification algorithm to classify Landsat 7 ETM+, and Landsat 8, OLI data collected from 1999 and 2016 and then detected changes in the land cover in the study area, it then measure urban sprawl by applying raster Boolean techniques to extract the urban area, Then compute the changes between the two composite classified images of 1999 and 2016. A scatterplots and histograms techniques is employed to evaluating training samples in confirming the degree of spectral separation acceptability of the bands used for each of the land use and land cover (LULC) classes conversion analysis in Environmental Systems Research Institute ESRI;s Arc Map was applied. Some post classification filters techniques is used to remove the small noise objects. The classification results over the two periods depicted that built up land increased in term of percentages 26.59% between 1999 and 2016. While rapid decreased is found in agricultural land 23.56%, barren land 3.30%. Water body is increased 0.27%. Similarly the built up land is increased 24.55 ha, whilst agricultural land is decreased 21.74 ha, barren land 3.04 ha, water body is increased 0.25 ha between 1999 and 2016. Our findings depict some of the significant changes in the land use and land cover patterns are analyzed in the city of Peshawar. The experimental results showed that major changes are observed in the built up area which rapidly increased at 26.59%, however the substantial decreased is found in the agricultural land, barren land in 1999 and 2016. Future studies should examine the entire district of Peshawar the current challenges faced by the city’s resident due to urban growth and attempt to find ways to resolve them in the future.