IMPACT ASSESSMENT OF WATERSHED MANAGEMENT ON LAND USE/LAND COVER CHANGE USING RS AND GIS: A CASE STUDY

The present study area is a micro watershed in semi-arid region in Telangana state, India, was given priority for land reclamation by governmental and nongovernmental organisation from past ten years. The main objective of this paper is to study the impact assessment of watershed management techniques towards the improvement in land use land cover change (LULC) in agriculture, wasteland and degraded forest areas using multi temporal remote sensing data and GIS. It includes LULC classification, post classification techniques to measure the change detection between 2005 and 2013. Increasing population from past several decades intensified land farming which has led to the rapid land use/land cover change. Among many causes agriculture expansion, natural climate changes and government policies play vital role for change in LULC. In this paper we attempted to analyse and monitor the changes using LISS III images from 2005 to 2013. Images were first classified using supervised classification by giving training pixels based on ground truth. Post classification comparison techniques were applied to analyse LULC change from satellite images and used to assess the accuracy of the classification results. Integration of ancillary data and supervised classification further improved the classification accuracy. The major changes at watershed level were increased area of both scrub forest/deciduous forest and water bodies. Also area reduced for wasteland and degraded forest classes. Even though the area is in semi-arid region showed significant increase in agriculture crops. The results indicate the overall positive impact due to watershed management programmes on the study area.