Abstract
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
Furthermore, increases of about 59%, 58%, 254%, 17% are reported in horticulture, sparse forest, built up and aquatic vegetation, respectively. Decrease in agriculture is attributed to decreased precipitation over study area. A decadal decrease of about 0.5% in precipitation is reported in the study area. Increased horticulture and dependency of population over forest significantly resulted in increased black carbon. This study reports a decadal increase of about 2.2% nm in black carbon in the study area. Reduction in precipitation affected Wular lake by shrinking its fresh water coverage. The fresh water area of the lake is decreased by 75% during 1979 to 2018. As one of the source of water for lake is precipitation in the form of (rain and snow), significant reduction in fresh water of Wular lake poses significant socio-economic impact on the population of study area. Present study highlights the importance of effective government policies for mitigating the impact of significant land use and land cover changes over Bandipora district.
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Meer, M.S., Mishra, A.K. & Rafiq, M. Spatio-temporal Patterns of Land Use Land Cover Changes over a District in Northern India and their Impact on Environment and Society. J Geol Soc India 97, 656–660 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12594-021-1741-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12594-021-1741-z