Current World Environment

Land use and land cover of a region is one of the prime concerns in current strategies for the evaluationof the watersheds and development of decision making policies. An uncertain increase in the population of the country along with the increasing demands has imposed an immense pressure on the land threatening the sustainability of the natural resources especially in the developing countries like India. The study was carried out to detect the land use and land cover changes observed in the Banjar River watershed lies in between Balaghat and Mandla districts of Madhya Pradesh, India using the multi spectral satellite dataset for two different years i.e. 2009 & 2013. The supervised classification was done in ERDAS IMAGINE software. The images of the study area was classified into seven classes namely, river, water body, waste land, habitation, forest, agriculture/other vegetation, open land/fallow land/barren land. The result indicates that during the last five years, forest, water body, waste land and open land/fallow land/barren has been increased by 2.26%, 0.55%, 0.23% and 0.48% respectively and the river, habitation and agriculture/other vegetation has been decreased by 0.26%, 0.04%, and 3.22% respectively. Accuracy assessment was also performed in this study to determine the quality of land use/cover map and overall accuracy was found 89.70% for 2009 and 91.91% for 2013.Present study emphasizes on digital change detection techniques for recognizing temporal changes in land use/land cover of the watershed. Outcomes of this study indicate need of implementing conservation and management practices for the socioeconomic development.