NDVI and NDMI indices based land use and land cover change analysis of Charaideu District, Assam, India.

Abstract

A transformation of natural environment to man-made environment causes Land use and Land cover change (LULC). These changes have been taking place due to human’s unethical uses of natural resources. Remote Sensing and GIS are the essential techniques to identify land use land cover change in an area. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) indices have been used to study the Land use changes in Charaideu District. The objectives of this paper are to analyse the spatio-temporal LULC, NDVI and NDMI changes and the impact of LULC change in NDVI and NDMI. Three multi-temporal satellite imageries for the years 1995, 2010, and 2020 were acquired from the United States Geological Survey website to meet the study's aims.The supervised classification method has been applied to prepare land use and land cover maps using Maximum Likelihood Algorithm and also the NDVI and NDMI maps for depicting vegetation pattern and moisture condition of the study area. It is revealed from the study that the areas under built-up land and agricultural hand have been increasing during the period 1995-2020. On the other hand, area under dense vegetation has decreased due to increasing population which leads to changes in vegetation pattern and moisture condition in the study area

Keywords: Land use land cover, Remote sensing, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Normalized Difference Moisture Index, Supervised classification, Maximum likelihood algorithm