Land use/land cover changes of Noyyal watershed in Coimbatore district, India, mapped using remote sensing techniques.

The present study undertakes to produce the land use/land cover map and to explore the change detection analysis of Noyyal watershed, Coimbatore, for a time period of 18 years. Based on the remote sensing and geographical information system for monitoring the temporal variations of land use/land cover, multi-temporal Landsat satellite 30-m spatial resolution images of Landsat 4/5 MSS and TM (1999), Landsat 7 ETM + (2008), and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) were obtained from the USGS website. The satellite images were geocoded into the universal transverse mercator (UTM) coordinate system zone 43 N. The unsupervised classification method was done by using an iterative self-organizing data analysis algorithm to compare the images and to classify the images into various land cover categories. Kappa statistics were used to assess the validation of the present study. The analysis suggests the total forest covered in 1999 was 22.69% and that of 2008 was 24.04% and reduced to 6.09%, in 2017. The agricultural land of 17.8% is reduced to 3.11% in 2008 and 0.86% in 2017. The settlements increased from 15.59 to 24.21% in 2008 and 27.14% in 2017. Increase in deforestation leads to increase in barren land. In 1999, the percentage of barren land was 17.2%; in 2008, it was 13.19%, and 50.93% in 2017. The overall accuracy estimation of the study is 73.19% and Kappa coefficient is 0.72. This study has proven a substantial strength of agreement for the map of 2017 from the result of validation rating criteria of Kappa statistics.