LAND USE LAND COVER DYNAMICS OF NILGIRIS DISTRICT, INDIA INFERRED FROM SATELLITE IMAGERIES

Land use Land cover changes are critical components in managing natural resources especially in hilly region as they trigger the erosion of soil and thus making the zone highly vulnerable to landslides. The Nilgiris district of Tamilnadu state in India is the first biosphere in Western Ghats region with rare species of flora and fauna and often suffered by frequent landslides. Therefore in this present study land use land cover dynamics of Nilgiri district has been studied from 1990 to 2010 using Satellite Remote Sensing Technique. The temporal changes of land use and land cover changes of Nilgiris district over the period of 1990 to 2010 were monitored using LISS I and LISS III of IRS 1A and IRS-P6 satellites. Land use dynamics were identified using Maximum likelihood classification under supervised classification technique. From the remote sensing study, it is found that during the study period of 1990 to 2010, area of dense forest increased by 27.17%, forest plantation area decreased by 54.64%. Conversion of forest plantation, Range land and open forest by agriculture and settlement leading to soil erosion and landslides. Tea plantation increased by 33.95% and agricultural area for plantation of vegetables increased rapidly to 217.56% in the mountain steep area. The accuracy of classification has been assessed by forming confusion matrix and evaluating kappa coefficient. The overall accuracy has been obtained as 83.7 and 89.48% for the years 1990 and 2010 respectively. The kappa coefficients were reported as 0.80 and 0.88 respectively for the years 1990 and 2010.