Assessment of LULC changes in Western Himalayan Mountain Landscape: A Case of Sainj River Valley, Himachal Pradesh (India)

Abstract

Landscape is multifaceted and it is the result of human interactions with their surrounding environment. More than half of the population of the world is dependent on the mountains for their ecosystem services which are now exhibiting signs of human pressure in the form of environment degradation. Himalayan Mountains are also fast succumbing to human greed for land and resources, resulting in the changes in their landscape. In this work we evaluate land use/land cover (LULC) changes in the biodiversity hotspot within a particular region located in the Western Himalaya. Sainj River Valley is in Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh. This study area is one of the major tributary of river Beas with an altitudinal range between 900 to 5800 meters, covering an area of 748.33 km2 and supporting a population over 25000 persons. For this study, we use GIS tools and remote sensing imagery of LANDSAT 5 and LANDSAT 8 for the year 1989 and 2020 respectively. Image classification has been done by using supervised classification with Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) where seven different classes are identified. The result reveals significant increase in land use classes such as agriculture (34.19%); settlements (89.42%), barren land (33.54%), and pasture land (19.01%) while noticeable decrease has been observed in snow cover (60%) and forest land (14.18%). A considerable change in barren land to pasture and forest land reflects the biodiversity conservation and management efforts of the park administration.