Monitoring Land Use/Land Cover Response to Urban Growth of the city of Jalandhar using Remote Sensing Data

Monitoring land use/land cover changes and its response to urban growth is very important to understand the urban dynamics for sustainable urban planning. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to examine the land use/land cover response to the processes of urban growth in the Jalandhar city. The aim of the study was to characterize the temporal and spatial pattern of urban growth and land use/land cover using the census and remote sensing information. Data on total population, population growth, population density of Jalandhar city from 1901 to 2011 and Landsat images of period 1975, 1989 and 2010 were used for the study. Dynamics of land use/land cover were quantified using a supervised classification algorithm in the Geographical Information System. The results revealed that the total population in the city has increased many folds. It contributes to the enlargement of the city that resulted in conversion of farming land use dominant landscape into urban land use dominant landscape during the last three decades. The analysis would be helpful to sustainable urban land use planning decisions for the metropolis.