Maximum Likelihood for Land-Use/Land-Cover Mapping and Change Detection Using Landsat Satellite Images: A Case Study “South Of Johor”

Land cover change has become a central component in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. Urban expansion has brought serious losses of agriculture land, vegetation land and water bodies. Urban sprawl is responsible for a variety of urban environmental issues like decreased air quality, increased local temperature and deterioration of water quality. In this study we have taken South of Johor as a case study to study the urban expansion and land cover change that took place in a period of time about of 16 years from 1995 to 2011. Remote sensing methodology is adopted to study the geographical land cover changes occur during the study period. Landsat TM and 7 ETM+ images of Johor are collected from the USGS Earth Explorer website. After image pre-processing, supervised classification has been performed to classify the images in different land cover categories. The study area classified into five classes: urban area, water bodies, vegetative area, barren land and unknown area (clouds). Classification accuracy is also estimated using the field knowledge obtained from using a topographic map and Google earth. The obtained accuracy is about 90.11% and 94.14%. Change detection analysis shows that built-up area has been increased by 3%, in the other side the vegetative area has been decreased by 12%. Information on urban growth, land use and land cover change is very useful to local government and urban planners for the betterment of future plans of sustainable development of the city