Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Natural Human Habitability Environment Along the Coastal Taluks of Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In this present world, due to the increasing adverse effect of anthropological activities on the natural environment causes a large scale environmental degradation which directly reduces the suitable natural environment for human habitation. As a consequence, in recent years, human realised the need for a favourable natural environment which is adoptable for habitation. In this present study, some of the following five criterions such as Land Surface Temperature (LST), vegetation coverage, impervious surface, wetness and water condition derived from the remotely sensed data were used to evaluate the Natural Human habitation Environment Suitability Index (NHESI) along the coastal taluks of Tamil Nadu. Landsat-7 (ETM+) images and Landsat-8 (OLI/TIRS) images with a spatial resolution of 30m have been used to derive the evaluation factors of NHESI for the year of 2000 and 2018. Multi Criteria Evaluation (MCE) based Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and fuzzy linear membership has been used in this study to evaluate the weighs and ratings of each criterion and its classes. The best NHESI is seen in 2000 where a total area of about 13902.9<span class="thinspace"></span>km<sup>2</sup> comes under the habitable region, against an area of 7726.9<span class="thinspace"></span>km<sup>2</sup> in 2018. The study area is further classified into moderately habitable, marginally habitable and uninhabitable regions. This study clearly indicates the degradation of the natural environmental conditions for human habitation. This kind of habitability study will help the researchers, decision makers and government agencies in creating awareness and adopting policies in the spatial planning of human land utilization for habitability.</p>

Eco-Environmental Vulnerability Zonation in Essence of Environmental Monitoring and Management

“…Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is the best decision-making technique in multicriteria evaluation, in this study all the main factors responsible for vulnerability and its sub factors are weighted, ranked and consistency ratio are calculated with the equation developed by (Saaty, 1977(Saaty, , 1980. The factor and sub factors are weighted with the pairwise comparison matrix (Saaty, 1990(Saaty, , 1994Saaty and Vargas, 2001;Rahaman and Aruchamy, 2017;Nitheshnirmal et al, 2018), each factor is compared with another factor to assign a value based on their importance from the scale of 1 to 9. Then 1 is equalizing importance, 9 is for extreme importance and so on.…”

An Assessment of Land Cover Change Dynamics of Gaja Cyclone in Coastal Tamil Nadu, India Using Sentinel 1 Sar Dataset

“…Proliferation of migration has led people to extensively utilize natural space and resources causing detriment to the environment (Kron, 2000). For Indian scenario, land suitability analysis plays a vital role as food security is challenged by natural disasters where 12.3%, 12% and 8% of total population in India is susceptible to flood, drought and cyclone respectively (Kumar et al, 2014& Nitheshnirmal et al, 2018. Extreme events like flash floods and cyclonic storms deposits bulks of sand and silt associated with flood water into crop fields thus deteriorating physical composition of fertile soil.…”

“…Remote sensing imageries are used for effective interpretation of land cover changes that are a significant factor in functioning of an ecosystem. Multispectral satellite images provides precise data about the existing landscape as it yields enhanced information with less Ground Sampling Distance (Nivedita et al, 2018). Optical data does not favor all the time rendering cloud free imageries.…”

Revealing the socio-economic vulnerability and multi-hazard risks at micro-administrative units in the coastal plains of Tamil Nadu, India

“…A comprehensive analysis using multiple physicalsocio-economic variables have also been attempted to identify the vulnerability (Bjarnadottir et al 2011;Mullick et al 2019). Coastal vulnerability index (Mujabar and Chandrasekar, 2013;Mahapatra et al 2015;Priya Rajan et al 2019), coastal sensitivity index (Shaj, 2014) and habitant vulnerability index (Nitheshnirmal et al 2018;Balasundareshwaran et al 2019) are examples of comprehensive attempts to analyse the physical and/or human vulnerability to individual/multi-hazards in India. However, there is very little knowledge/analysis on socio-economic vulnerabilities at micro (village/ward) level considering predominantly the socio-economic variables instead of the highly location-specific physical vulnerability parameters (Hoque et al 2019).…”