Land Use Land Cover Change Detection and Measuring Horticulture Expansion through Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques in Rambiara Catchment, Kashmir Valley, India

Abstract

Horticulture industry is backbone of the economy of the Jammu and Kashmir, it has increased spontaneously from a recent couple of decades and had immensely impacted the socio-economic conditions of the inhabitants of the Rambiara Catchment. The study aimed to identify the varied land use and land cover categories prevailing over the Rambiara catchment and attempted to study the temporal changes. Multispectral images of the Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 were brought into use by making the LULC classes through the maximum supervised classification for the images of year 1999 and year 2019. Whole the study area was classified into eight major land cover categories i.e., Horticulture, Settlement, Water, Riverbed, Dense Forests, Sparce Forests and Waste Lands. The results obtained depicted that there was a large-scale positive change observed by the land cover categories of Horticulture +172.67 percent, Settlement +112.06 percent and sparse forest by +28.44 percent. The horticulture remained the highest achiever over the last 20 years and this is because of the high cash value realized from fruits, less agricultural production obtained from crops other than fruits and also due to changing climatic.