SPACE BORNE TECHNIQUE TO IDENTIFY THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VEGETATION COVER AND URBANIZATION IN THE CITY OF COLOMBO

Urban vegetation coverage can be considered as one of the indicators that can be used to identify, the process of urbanization. Most of the time with rapid urbanization, vegetation coverage in a city tend to decrease. Hence, it is explicitly visible that the social background, building density and related factors to the urbanization process, have a high relationship with minimizing city vegetation coverage. There are many techniques that can be used to identify the relationship between the process of urbanization and vegetation coverage. Space borne (Remote Sensing (RS) technique) is one of the tools to identify such kind of phenomena. As the main commercial hub in the island, the city of Colombo has expanded as an agglomeration and alsopopulation density is increasing rapidly. Massive constructions have also covered major parts of the city, rapidly. In the past years, vegetation coverage minimizes with these processes. Considering all these facts, this study has attempted to identify the relationship between vegetation coverage and urbanization in the city of Colombo with the help of RS techniques. Hence, to identify the relationship between vegetation cover and urbanization, Landsat 8 OLI TIRS (2014) satellite images were used to construct Normalize Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Urban Index (UI) to fulfill the study aim. The results indicated that, there is a significant negative relationship between urbanization process and vegetation coverage in the city.