Effect of Urban Land Use on Agriculture, Forest, and River Beds: A Case Study of Dehradun City, Uttarakhand, India

Urbanization has led to a tremendous pressure on available land in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. Therefore, proper land planning measures are required to mitigate the effect of urbanization on agriculture, forest, and water bodies. This study illustrates the use of remote sensing and GIS to detect the change in urban sprawl of Dehradun region during the period 2013–18 and its effect on agriculture, forest, and water bodies. Landsat 8 imagery has been used in this study. Supervised classification has been adopted in Landsat 8 images of the study area. Four different land cover classes have been considered in classification stage. These are urban, forests, agriculture and vegetation, and seasonal river beds. The accuracy obtained for both the images after classification was above 85% for good change detection results. The change detection technique used is post-classification comparison method which is the matrix union method. The study has shown that the built-up area in Dehradun city has expanded from 75.07 km² in 2013 to 105.51 km² in 2018 and 0.26 km² of forest area, 34.40 km² of agricultural land, and 2.56 km² of water beds have been converted into built-up area in the duration of 5 years. The increase in built-up area from 2013 to 2018 is 40.54%.