Time sequential surface change analysis of Talcher-Angul region of Orissa using Remote Sensing and GIS Panwar Shweta1, Sinha Rakesh Kumar1, Singh Gurdeep2,* 1Symbiosis Institute of Geoinformatics, Pune 2Centre of Mining Environment, Dept. of Environmental Science & Engg., Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India *Email: s_gurdeep2001@yahoo.com
Online published on 3 January, 2012. Abstract AngulTalcher has been emerging as a major industrial centre with intense and large scale coal mining activities. As a consequence, this has been declared as a critically polluted area particularly due to severe land degradation. Land use pattern of Angul Talcher has undergone several changes over the years. Surface and sub surface mining and industrial activities have resulted in considerable changes in the land use pattern. An attempt has been made to study the time series surface changes in Land Use and Land Cover in TalcherAngul region for the years 1973, 2007 and 2011 covering an area of 5028 sq.kms. Different interpretation techniques such as unsupervised classification, digitization and visual interpretation were used on the satellite image, toposheet and Google Earth image respectively. An immense increment of 22.58% can be seen in wasteland and decrement of 26.44% in agriculture over a period of 38 years. During 1973 and 2007, major changes took place in wasteland and agriculture however between 2007 and 2011, the forest was the most affected entity with a decrease of 1.4%. This study emphasises the need to hold the agricultural lands and forests from the growing mining and industrial interference. Top Keywords Land use, Land cover, Land change. Top |