LAUSR

Land-use change of a region acts as an indicator of human impact on the landscape. Increasing urban growth has induced adverse landscape alterations which need to be predicted and controlled, especially in the urban areas and ‘rurban’ fringes, to prevent the trends of urbanization from engulfing the ecology. The present discussion makes an attempt to address this issue by assessing the present and predicting the future spatio-temporal dynamisms in land use and land cover along the urban and rurban fringe area of eastern Kolkata, stretching from the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass to Bhangar areas in West Bengal, India. For the fulfilment of the work, Landsat imageries of 1991 and 2016 have been chosen to depict the present urban growth, following which the results have been predicted and validated to show how the various land-use categories might change, using the Markov model. The study has depicted that urban growth continues to shift eastwards, resulting in greater number of urban patches in eastwards. The validation of positive and negative growth of respective land-use patterns with Markov model is within 10%. So, if the current reclamation activities continue, the original land cover shall decrease by 70% of the study area and these shall be replaced by urban areas.