Quantification and understanding the observed changes in land cover patterns in Bangalore

ndia is a developing country contributing about 17.85% to the world population, which has its 67.25% population in rural area and 32.74% in urban areas in 2015. Unplanned urban growth due to rapid urbanization is one of the greatest threat to its overall urban sustainability. Unplanned growth leads to misuse of limited essential resources available around the cities. The overuse becomes a barrier to sustainability of local environment and hampers its future development options. The paper deals with understanding the unstructured past growth pattern of a mega city in India; case study of Bangalore. The aim of this study is to estimate and quantify the changes occurred in Bangalore during 2000-2016. Multisource satellite data with variable resolution (30m, 38m, 250m) are used to understand and quantify the spatio-temporal changes in land cover pattern over Bangalore. Results show that Bangalore city experienced that rapid increase in population and urbanization for the past few decades. As a result of which, area of water bodies and green cover has decreased while number of concrete structures and vehicles has increased dramatically. This indeed put stress on the overall sustainability of this city