Abstract
Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) maps are crucial for assessing the status of environmental and natural resources management in any river basin or watershed. LULC is a cross-cutting environmental variable that also finds significant applications in hydrological modeling, watershed management, natural disaster management, climate change studies, and land management. This research study uses three different classification algorithms to investigate the LULC status of the Alaknanda river basin of the northwest Himalayan region in India. The entire area was classified into nine LULC classes using Landsat 8 satellite imagery, initially employing the Maximum Likelihood algorithm. This generated a reasonably good overall accuracy with a high Kappa coefficient of 0.79. However, the producer’s accuracies for a few significant classes were not satisfactory. This research attempts to explain the anomaly in the producer’s accuracy and improve them using machine learning-based classification algorithms. Furthermore, machine learning-based classification algorithms, namely Random Trees (RT) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were employed. Both the algorithms generated good overall accuracy with high Kappa values of 0.83 and 0.82, respectively. Interestingly, the qualitative and quantitative comparisons for the classification results revealed that both RT and SVM algorithms resulted in improved and high producer’s accuracies. Therefore, this study infers that for mountainous watersheds with high variations in elevation and steep topography, machine learning-based classification algorithms perform better than the conventional statistical classification algorithm.
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The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the manuscript in the form of tables.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to express a deep sense of gratitude and sincere thanks to the Department of Water Resources Development and Management (WRD&M), IIT Roorkee, for providing a conducive environment and resources to conduct the research work.
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Singh, G., Pandey, A. Evaluation of classification algorithms for land use land cover mapping in the snow-fed Alaknanda River Basin of the Northwest Himalayan Region. Appl Geomat 13, 863–875 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12518-021-00401-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12518-021-00401-3