Land use change modeling

Land Use Land Cover Change (LULC) is an important element of global environmental change. The need to understand LULC change is essential for regional development and land use management towards sustainable development. To understand LULC change, the different LULC categories and their spatial as well as temporal variability in Tiruchirappalli city in Tamil Nadu State has been studied over a period of six years (2007-2012), by analysing of Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS) images. An attempt was made to adopt Markov model for understanding LULC dynamics. The simulated LULC area of year 2011 was compared with the actual area interpreted from 2011 satellite image (CARTOSAT - 1) and the future LULC in the year 2015 was derived using a Markov model. The results showed that Markov model and Geospatial technology together are able to effectively capture the spatio-temporal trend in the landscape pattern associated with urbanization in this region.