Application of remote sensing and GIS in land resource management

Land use Land cover (LU/LC) mapping serve as a basic information for land resource study. Detecting and analysing the quantitative changes along the earth’s surface has become necessary and advantageous because it can result in proper planning which would ultimately result in improvement in infrastructure development, economic and industrial growth. The LU/LC pattern of Madurai city, Tamil Nadu, has undergone a significant change over past two decades due to accelerated urbanization. In this study, LU/LC change dynamics were investigated by the combined use of satellite remote sensing and geographical information system. To understand the LU/LC change in Madurai city, the different land use categories and their spatial as well as temporal variability has been studied over a period of seven years (1999-2006), from the analysis of LANDSAT images for the years 1999 and 2006 respectively, using ArcGIS 9.3 and ERDAS Imagine 9.1 software. This result shows that Geospatial technology is able to effectively capture the spatio-temporal trend in the landscape pattern associated with urbanization for this region.