Quantifying the Dynamics and Drivers of Landscape Change in an Opencast Coal Mining Area of Central India (East Bokaro,
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Quantifying the Dynamics and Drivers of Landscape Change in an Opencast Coal Mining Area of Central India (East Bokaro, Jharkhand) Sujata Upgupta1
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Prasoon Kumar Singh1
Received: 16 January 2017 / Revised: 29 October 2018 / Accepted: 20 December 2018 The National Academy of Sciences, India 2019
Abstract This paper evaluates the spatiotemporal dynamics of landscape change and identifies the primary drivers of deforestation in East Bokaro coalfields from 1972 to 2016 using grid-based change detection and spatial statistics. Landsat images for the years 1972, 2001 and 2016 were classified using a supervised maximum likelihood technique to generate the land use and land cover maps for each year. Square grids of 500 m were used to quantify the cumulative changes in land cover from 1972 to 2016. Grid-based correlation and regression analyses were used to identify the drivers of change. The results revealed that the area has undergone major changes in land cover pattern in the last 44 years due to expansion of mining activities. Forests and agriculture have reduced while settlement and barren lands have increased considerably. Extensive plantation activities on mining wastelands in the last few decades have led to an increase in the forest cover by about 8.22%. Correlations indicated that both mining and agriculture increased at the expense of forests to some degree and agricultural lands were sacrificed for the expansion of built-up areas. Regression analysis confirmed that agriculture and mining were the most influential factors driving the changes in forest cover. Keywords East Bokaro Coal mining Land use Land cover Regression Drivers
& Sujata Upgupta [email protected] Prasoon Kumar Singh [email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad, Jharkhand 826 004, India
1 Introduction Land is one of the most important natural resources, and its management requires information on the current state of the landscape. This is achieved by land cover mapping, a process that quantifies how much of a region is covered by forests, wetlands, agriculture and other land and water types. Analyzing changes in landscape over a period of time helps in better understanding of interactions and relationships between human activities and natural phenomena. This understanding is necessary for systematic resource management, improved decision making [1, 2] and assessing the impacts of economic development on the environment. Geospatial techniques have been widely used in the past few decades to observe spatial and temporal changes in land use/land cover changes [3]. Remote sensing data with its various spectral and spatial resolutions have a great potential to produce comprehensive and accurate information for mapping and monitoring of land use/cover over a period of time. Datasets of different time periods are analyzed to demonstrate the landscape dynamics regardless of the driving forces. The last couple of decades have seen a con
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