Advances in Remote Sensing Technology and the Three Poles

24 Investigation of Land Use/Land Cover Changes in Alaknanda River Basin, Himalaya During 1976–2020

Varun Narayan Mishra^*

Amity Institute of Geoinformatics & Remote Sensing, Amity University, Sector 125, Noida 201313, Uttar Pradesh, India

^* Corresponding author

24.1 Introduction

In general, the land-use term mentions the utilization of land resources by many anthropogenic activities, while land cover is the habitat or natural surface of the Earth (Di Gregorio and Jansen, 2005; Mishra and Rai, 2016). Accurate and up-to-date land use/land cover (LULC) information is vital for the proper utilization, planning, and inventory of natural resources in a sustainable manner (Sheeja et al., 2011; Mishra and Rai, 2016). At the same time, changes in LULC are assumed to be a major threat for the biodiversity, ecosystem services, and ecological balance in future scenarios. Timely information of the LULC change (LULCC) is of increasing significance in several fields of studies like environmental impact and vulnerability assessment (Nguyen and Liou, 2019; Talukdar and Pal, 2020), monitoring of hazards and natural disasters (Liou et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2019), and regional and urban planning (Mishra et al., 2019; Arora et al., 2021) at different scales. The effects of LULCC on both the function of the Earth’s system and the majority of ecosystems are widely accepted phenomena worldwide (Lambin et al., 2001; Wu et al., 2017; Muleta et al., 2021). The spatio-temporal dynamics of LULCC is ...