Temporal change analysis and future scenario generation for land use land cover of micro watershed of Lag valley, Kullu, Himachal Pradesh, India
Student name: Ms Ankita Singh
Guide: Dr P K Joshi
Year of completion: 2012
Host Organisation: TERI University
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr Puneet Diwedi
Abstract: The present study was carried out in Lag Valley, Kullu, Himachal Pradesh. It is an overview of temporal change
analysis and predicts future change patterns in Land Use Land Cover (LULC). There has been extensive extraction
of fuel wood and fodder from Lag Valley. The communities’ high dependency on the forest is the leading cause for
the degradation of the forests in the region. To further understand more on the human- ecosystem interactions a
pilot study was conducted in one of the micro watershed regions of the Valley which consists of nine villages.
The major land use land cover types are Forests and Agriculture. Forests are further divided based on the canopy
density i.e. grassland, settlement and alpine pasture. For the past 30 years these two classes have witnessed the
most changes.
The study utilized data from satellites (ASETR and Land Sat) for the preparation of LULC for the study area.
ASTER data sets covered the years 2002, 2005 and 2010 while the Land Sat datasets were for 1989, 2000 and 2011.
The land cover was developed through segmentation in the e-cognition. Segmentation is an object oriented
classification which performs better for feature extraction and classification.
Forecasting used the Land Change Modeler (LCM), which is a combined form of cellular and expert system model.
This is a robust model for forecasting land use as it utilizes the inbuilt functions of neural network for modeling the
transition potentials of the land which is going under conversion.
Keywords: LULC, ecosystem, ASTER, Land Sat and LCM
