Environmental Sustainability Assessment of a Himalayan Catchment With Land Cover Indices and LST Relationship Using Principal Component Analysis – A Geospatial Approach

Abstract

Abstract. Environmental sustainability assessment is a crucial part of the management of natural resources. Remote Sensing based environmental land cover indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), and its associated Land Surface Temperature (LST) are the major governing factors for the environmental processes that happen on the surface of the earth . These NDVI, NDWI, NDBI, NDMI, and LST are generated for 2020 using the Landsat satellite datasets. The process-based relationship among them is complex and involves various parameters but may be easily represented by multiple linear regression models. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one such type that efficiently handles and evaluates the contribution of each of these factors to each other based on the sampling units. The study area is the upper Ramganga catchment in the Indian Himalayas, consisting of 117 sub-catchments. These catchment units (samples) are entangled with these environmental factors. The results of the PCA reveal the relationship between each of the environmental factors and their priority. Based on the uncorrelated factors priority suggestion from the PCA, catchment units were classified as high, moderate, or low categories based on their dominance in the relationship among the factors. These spatial variations in the environmental factors can help to assess the sustainability of resources in the Himalayan catchment.