A Remote Sensing Approach To Define Landscape Dynamics In Raniganj Coalfield Area Through Trend Line Analysis

Opencast mining certainly put forwards enormous treasure and service benefits. Alongside it adversely causes widespread environmental decay especially land alteration and mutation. Therefore in recent time land use land cover changes in human influenced area have been a breakthrough for research (Steven, 1987). The researcher strives to asses and interpret the pattern of land use change due to opencast coal mining in Sodepur, Salanpur, Sripur, Satgram, Pandaveswer, Kunstoria, Kajora, Kenda, Sonepur Bazari, Bankola and Jhanjra areas of Raniganj coalfield using remotely sensed data. In order to compute the LULC changes since last five decades five spatial maps are prepared with ten distinctive classes using supervised image classification method followed by maximum likelihood algorithm in ERDAS Imagine software. To know the trend and pattern of landscape change the remotely sensed data further analyzed in Microsoft Excel. Result shows that agricultural land dominates the research area, but the area is declining from 55253.65 hectare in 1973 to 44858.6 hectare in 2015 and exhibits a negative growth rate. Contrary, urban area sharply indicates the inverse trend. The area has increased exponentially from 3552.24 hectare in 1973 to 19648.72 hectare in 2015. The patterns and trends of LULC change denotes that since 1973 the percentage of natural land use is decreasing where the man made land use is increasing.