An Attempt to Analyse the Driving Forces of Land Use Changes of a Tropical River Basin: A Case Study of the Muhuri River, Tripura, North-East India

Abstract

The present study illustrates the spatio-temporal change of land use and land cover of the Muhuri River basin using multispectral imagery under GIS environment. Satellite imagery is the good representation of spatiotemporal change of LULC of the study area. The remote sensing data, derived from Land sat imagery acquired by Earth Explorer for three different years i.e., 1975, 1995 and 2016, and processed using different enhancement techniques. For change detection of LULC supervised classification method has been adopted using maximum likelihood technique in Arc GIS 10.1. The LULC of the study area has been categorised into six types like open forest, dense forest, settlement, barren land, cultivated land and water body. The classification accuracy is assessed by estimating the Overall Accuracy, Producer’s Accuracy and User’s Accuracy. The overall accuracy of all the maps ranges between 87- 91%. The study of land use change in four decades (1975-2016) shows that settled area and agricultural area of the basin have been increased by 180.95% and 128.36% respectively while, on the other hand, the area under open forest and dense forest have been decreased by 69.04% and 92.56% respectively. The study also reveals that high population pressure and traditional jhoom cultivation trigger the conversion of the forest land into settled area, agricultural land and barren land.