Future land use land cover prediction with special emphasis on urbanization and wetlands

Manipur River basin lies in the northeastern part of India in the lesser Himalayan ranges and it is under extreme pressure from natural and anthropogenic factors. This study aims to monitor and predict the future land use land cover (LULC) for the region using land change modeller (LCM) in TerrSet. Landsat satellite images were used to produce LULC map for three different years 2007, 2014 and 2017. Based on these past LULC map, future LULC map of the study area was developed using Markov Chain and artificial neural network (ANN) analysis in LCM. ANN was trained with the driver variable, namely, distance from roads, distance from settlement, elevation and slope. Results indicate that there was an increase in area under waterbodies, agriculture and built-up area by 15.93%, 2.42% and 11.58%, respectively, in 2017 with respect to initial LULC condition in 2007. It can also be observed that there was decrease of 6.08%, 28.65% and 0.55% in wetlands, herbaceous wetlands and forest, respectively. Furthermore, similar trends were observed in the predicted LULC map of 2030 with an increase of 16.4%, 3.06% and 20.99% in waterbodies, agriculture and built-up area, and decrease of 6.48%, 41.56% and 1.4% in wetlands, herbaceous wetlands and forest. Based on the result of predicted LULC of 2030 which indicates drastic change in built-up area and herbaceous wetlands, there is a need for formulating proper urban planning and environmental preservation policies.