Assessment of Land Use-Land Cover Changes in District Dehradun (1991-2021)

The region of district Dehradun in Uttarakhand, India has shown a rapid growth in population and urbanization in the last few decades. An attempt was made to assess the land use-land cover (LULC) changes in the entire district in the last 30 years from 1991 to 2021. Satellite imagery from the Landsat-5, 8 with a spatial resolution of 30 m was used as the remotely sensed data and the open-source software QGIS was used to process the data and produce the LULC maps and other important statistics using the maximum likelihood algorithm. The study has shown that during 1991-2021, dense forest, active cropland and sparse vegetation areas have decreased by 17.52%, 62.11% and 7.50% respectively whereas built-up and bare soil areas have increased by 112.23% and 44.32% respectively. No definite conclusions regarding change in areas could be reached for water and dry river bed but in general, the total stream flow area was observed to be decreasing. The average overall accuracy of the classifications was found to be 85.01% with a kappa coefficient of 0.794.