CONTEMPORARY LAND USE AND LAND COVER PATTERN OF AMBALA DISTRICT, HARYANA: A LANDSAT 8-BASED REMOTE SENSING AND GIS ASSESSMENT FOR 2024
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29121/02abx886Keywords:
LULC, Ambala District, Landsat 8, Remote Sensing, GIS, MLC, MNDWIAbstract
The study looks at the current land use and land cover (LULC) of Ambala district in Haryana using Landsat 8 OLI imagery and GIS techniques. Landsat Collection 2 Level 2 Surface Reflectance data (30m resolution) were processed in QGIS 3.40.9 using the Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin. Six classes were produced: built-up area, cropland, vegetation and tree plantations, water bodies, bare land and scrubland. The Maximum Likelihood Classification was augmented with visual correction and a MNDWI based water refinement. The final raster has 1,682,365 pixels covering 1,514.13 km2. Cropland is by far the most dominant class at 889.82 km2 (58.77%), followed by bare land at 324.49 km2 (21.43%), scrubland at 123.90 km2 (8.18%), built-up area at 121.77 km2 (8.04%), vegetation and tree plantations at 50.59 km2 (3.34%) and water bodies at 3.56 km2 (0.23%). Accuracy assessment using 5,825 validation pixels yielded an overall accuracy of 96.71% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.9451. The results clearly demonstrate the continued dominance of agriculture in the district with settlement development and the open river basin areas being the other key features.
References
Anderson, J. R., Hardy, E. E., Roach, J. T., and Witmer, R. E. (1976). A land use and Land Cover Classification System for use with Remote Sensor Data. U.S. Geological Survey. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3133/pp964
Chauhan, A., Kumar, P., and Kumar, S. (2019). Remote Sensing Assessment of Land use and Land Cover Variability in Ambala and Naraingarh Tehsil, Haryana (2018). Shodh Sarita, 6(24), 66–72.
Chauhan, A., Kumar, P., and Kumar, S. (2020a). From Space to Surface: Decoding Land use and land Cover of Ambala Tehsil via Satellite Imagery, March 2018. Shodh Sarita, 7(26), 89–94.
Chauhan, A., Kumar, P., and Kumar, S. (2020b). Landsat 8 Imagery Insights: A Study on Barara Tehsil's land use and cover, March 2018. Shodh Sanchar Bulletin, 10(39), 90–95.
Jensen, J. R. (2015). Introductory Digital Image Processing: A Remote Sensing Perspective (4th ed.). Pearson.
Lillesand, T. M., Kiefer, R. W., and Chipman, J. W. (2015). Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation (7th ed.). Wiley.
Pandey, A. C., and Nathawat, M. S. (2006). Land Use-Land Cover Mapping Through Digital Image Processing of Satellite Data: A Case Study from Panchkula, Ambala and Yamunanagar districts, Haryana State, India.
Priyanka. (2017). Land Use/Land Cover Mapping Through Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques. International Journal of Research in Geography, 3(2), 22–25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.20431/2454-8685.0302004
Richards, J. A., and Jia, X. (2013). Remote Sensing Digital Image Analysis: An Introduction (5th ed.). Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30062-2
Wulder, M. A., Loveland, T. R., Roy, D. P., Cohen, W. B., Healey, S. P., Hicke, J. A., Pestana, G., and Zhu, Z. (2019). Current status of Landsat Program, Science, and applications. Remote Sensing of Environment, 225, 127–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.02.015 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.02.015
Xu, H. (2006). Modification of Normalised Difference Water Index (NDWI) to Enhance Open-Water Features in Remotely Sensed Imagery. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 27(14), 3025–3033. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01431160600589179
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Ajay Chauhan, Sunil Kumar (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
With the licence CC-BY, authors retain the copyright, allowing anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute, and/or copy their contribution. The work must be properly attributed to its author.
It is not necessary to ask for further permission from the author or journal board.
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
