Development of an integrated peri-urban wetland degradation assessment approach for the Chatra Wetland in eastern India

Abstract

The loss of peri-urban wetlands is a major side effect of urbanization in India in recent days. Timely and proper assessment of wetland area change is essential for the conservation of wetlands. This study follows the integrated way of the peri-urban wetland degradation assessment in the case of medium and small-size urban agglomerations with a special focus on Chatra Wetland. Analysis of land-use and land cover (LULC) maps of the past 28 years shows a decrease of 60% area of the wetland including marshy land. This has reduced the ecosystem services value by about 71.90% over the period 1991–2018. From this end, The Land Change Modeler of IDRISI TerrSet using the combination of MLPNN and Markov Chain has been used to predict the LULC map of this region. The scenario-based modeling following the LULC conversion and nine explanatory variables suggests the complete loss of this wetland by 2045. However, the authors have also tried to present a future LULC pattern of this region based on an environmental perspective. This proposed map suggests possible areas for built-up expansion on the western side of the city without significantly affecting the environment.

Landscape Pattern Evolution Processes and the Driving Forces in the Wetlands of Lake Baiyangdian

“…According to the second national wetland survey conducted by China's State Forestry Administration between 2009 and 2013, which was based on China Brazil Earth Resources Satellite remote sensing and field measurements, wetland area was reduced by 33,963 km 2 , with a loss rate of 8.82% compared to the first national wetland survey [6]. It is evident that there has been a dramatic degradation and loss of wetlands over the past few decades in China [7], and the driving factors of wetland degradation and fragmentation may be related to the continuously changing climate conditions, intensive human disturbance, associated pollution, and human need for water and biological resources [2,6,[8][9][10]. Wetland landscape fragmentation can be determined using the spatial distribution of vegetation (e.g., the shape, size, and quantity of landscape features) [11,12].…”

Evaluating the impact of land use and land cover change on unprotected wetland ecosystems in the arid-tropical areas of South Africa using the Landsat dataset and support vector machine

“…Satellite imagery, such as Landsat, ASTER, SPOT, AVHRR and MODIS, provide long-term spatial data archives for ecological assessment, monitoring and management purposes (Muavhi and Mavhungu 2020). These images have been used in various studies, for example, on LULC change, wetland monitoring and extent mapping, biomass estimation and mapping, soil moisture applications, inundation mapping and water level monitoring (Basu et al 2021;Chatziantoniou et al 2017;Connolly 2018;Ligate et al 2018;Mudereri et al, 2019;Munishi and Jewitt 2019;Slagter et al 2020;Yirsaw et al 2017), amongst others. In the above-mentioned studies, several techniques such as maximum likelihood, support vector machine, artificial neural network, CART, random forest, object-based image analysis and decision tree were applied to assess wetland changes.…”

Urban encroachment in ecologically sensitive areas: drivers, impediments and consequences

“…Many studies apply remote sensing methodologies to quantify the scale and magnitude of natural areas lost in the growth path of major cities. Some of these have documented the reduction of wetlands (Ahmed et al 2019;Basu et al 2021;Kiran & Joshi 2013;Goswami et al 2020), deforestation and forest degradation (Remondi et al 2016;Ahrends et al 2010), decrease in vegetation cover (Abass et al 2020;Hou et al 2016;Yao et al 2019) and increasing fragmentation of natural areas (Kowe et al 2021;Girma et al 2019;Wang & Pei 2020). However, these studies offer limited insights into the drivers and dynamics of urban development in ecologically sensitive areas, why such sites are not sufficiently protected from encroachment and how more sustainable trajectories of expansion may be achieved.…”