7. Studies on Impacts of Land Use/Land Cover Changes on Groundwater Resources: A Critical Review

Presently, enormous expansions of the built-up environment have been going on at the fastest rate overtime to fulfill the demand of the world population. In this study, the Landsat satellite images of different times with various sensors were used. Various types of change detection methods like unsupervised, supervised classification, image differencing and discriminant function were used to measure the number of changes in land use/land cover with a spatio-temporal scale. Land use/land cover classes were detected by using the spectral reflectance signature. Results of the previous studies showed that built-up environment growth is at a rapid rate at the cost of agricultural land, fellow land, vegetation and water bodies. Climatic parameter like temperature gradually increases with the expansion of the built-up environment. On the other hand rainfall has decreased overtime at a spatial scale. So temperature and rainfall have also been influencing on depth to groundwater level. Continuous alteration of land use/land cover in an area for the purpose of regional development resulting alarming decrease in ground water level since the underlying surfaces have coverage by impervious materials that reduce the recharge of groundwater affect the cycling of groundwater. Spatial–temporal analysis of groundwater table fluctuation data indicates that it has been gradually declining in the groundwater level in respect to depth.