Remote Sensing and GIS based Land Use Land Cover Analysis in Chandel District, Manipur, India

Rapid urbanization has dramatically altered land use and land cover (LULC). The focus of this research is on the examination of the last two decades. The research was conducted in the Chandel district of Manipur, India. The LULC of Chandel (encompassing a 3313 km² geographical area) was mapped using remotely sensed images from LANDSAT4-5, LANDSAT 7 ETM+, and LANDSAT 8 (OLI) to focus on spatial and temporal trends between years 2000 and 2021. The LULC maps with six major classifications viz., Thickly Vegetated Area (TVA), Sparsely Vegetated Area (SVA), Agriculture Area (AA), Population Area (PA), Water Bodies (WB), and Barren Area (BA) of the were generated using supervised classification approach. For the image classification procedure, interactive supervised classification is adopted to calculate the area percentage. The results interpreted that the TVA covers approximately 65% of the total mapped area in year 2002, which has been decreased up to 60% in 2007, 56% in 2011, 55 % in 2017, and 52% in 2021. The populated area also increases significantly in these two decades. The change and increase in the PA has been observed from year 2000 (8%) to 2021 (11%). Water Bodies remain same throughout the study period. Deforestation occurs as a result of the rapid rise of the population and the extension of the territory.