Vol. 10, Issue 12 (2021)

Author(s):
SD Dhaigude, HN Bhange, BL Ayare, ST Patil and PB Bansode

Abstract:
Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) is the important source of information for the watershed development as the land use and land cover significantly affect the volume and velocity of the runoff. The information about land use and land cover plays important role in decision making land conservation, management of water resources and sustainable development. Therefore, the research was made to detect the changes in land use patterns in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra from the year 2013 to 2018 using Landsat 8 data along with Arc GIS 10.3 and Google Earth software. The land use was classified into five categories as agricultural land, forest land, barren land, water bodies and residential area using the supervised classification method. The area under agriculture, forest land, barren land, residential area and water bodies for Ratnagiri district in the year 2013 was 38.43%, 43.93%, 12.97%, 3.70% and 0.97%, respectively. Over the considered study period of five years, in 2018, the change in the area under forest and barren land was found to be decreased by 0.22% and 2.43%, respectively. At the same time area under agriculture and residence or built-up was increased by 0.81% and 1.86%, respectively. The accuracy of the land use mapping was calculated by comparing the temporal data of 2013 and 2018 available in Google Earth software using Kappa coefficient. The results showed that the overall accuracy was 90.83% and 90% for the years 2013 and 2018, respectively.