Spatio-temporal Patterns of Land Use Land Cover Changes over a District in Northern India and their Impact on Environment and Society

This study focuses on exploring spatio-temporal changes in land use and land cover over Bandipora district of Jammu and Kashmir, India. There is significant decreases in agriculture, dense forest, and water body over the region with positive changes in the built-up area, aquatic vegetation, horticulture, marshy land, pasture, plantation, and sparse forest. It is interesting to note that Asia’s largest fresh water lake “Wular” which has witnessed a large scale change in its ecosystem falls in the study area. Land use and land cover maps were explored using on screen digitisation generated from series of Landsat data (1979, 2001 and 2018). Environmental parameters like precipitation (both rain and snowfall), temperature and black carbon were analysed in order to relate with land-use and land-cover changes in the study area. Results report decreases of about 23%, 25%, 12%, 60% in agriculture, dense forest, scrub, water body, respectively from 1979 to 2018 in the study area