Land Use/Land Cover Monitoring and Change Detection of Sabarmati River Basin Using GIS and Remote Sensing

India has been experiencing a significant change in the land use/land cover (LULC) pattern over several decades. So, in order to understand long-term patterns of the usage of natural resources and achieve sustainable development, effective observation and mapping of LULC maps are necessary using the spatial data. In this paper, LULC changes in the Sabarmati River basin were analyzed using Decadal land use map of 1985, 1995, and 2005. The land use map was processed in ArcGIS 10.1 software for all the three years, and land use map of Sabarmati River basin was extracted. The LULC map thus obtained showed eleven different land use classes which were then reclassified into five classes agricultural, forest, built-up land, barren land, and waterbodies. A comparative analysis was made between two decades LULC pattern, i.e., 1985–2005 to detect the LULC changes. The results depicted that there was a decrease in the agricultural land by 0.54% (−165.27 km²) and forest area by 0.40% (−121.70 km²) and an increase in the barren land by 0.01% (4.07 km²) and the built-up area by 0.55% (166.71 km²). It was also depicted that the water bodies area also increased by 0.38% (116.18 km²). The increase in the area of the barren land and built-up land results as an important parameter leading to increase in chances of floods every time as monsoon hits Gujarat. The study shows that GIS and remote sensing techniques serve as an important tool for the temporal analysis of spatial data and detecting changes in LULC consuming less time and cost effective with better precision.