Concepedia

Land use change modelling using a Markov model and remote sensing

Sathees Kumar, Nisha Radhakrishnan, Samson Mathew

Geomatics Natural Hazards and Risk · 2013 · 219 citations · 20 references

Open access

TL;DR

Land‑use/land‑cover change is a key component of global environmental change and is essential for regional development and sustainable land‑use management. The authors analyzed IRS satellite images of Tiruchirappalli from 1998–2006, applied a Markov model to capture LU/LC dynamics, validated the model against CARTOSAT‑1 PAN maps, and projected future landscape distributions for 2014 and 2022. The Markov model combined with geospatial technology successfully captured the spatio‑temporal trend of urbanization‑driven landscape change in the region.

Abstract

Land-use/land-cover (LU/LC) change is an important component of global environmental change. The need to understand LU/LC change is essential for regional development and land use management towards sustainable development. To understand LU/LC change, the different LU/LC categories and their spatial as well as temporal variability in Tiruchirappalli city has been studied over a period of eight years (1998–2006), using the analysis of Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS) images. In this, an attempt was made to adopt Markov model for obtaining and understanding LU/LC dynamics. Model performance was evaluated between the empirical LU/LC map extracted from CARTOSAT-1 PAN image and the simulated LU/LC map obtained from the Markov model. The future landscape distribution in the year 2014 and 2022 was derived using a Markov model. This result shows that Markov model and geospatial technology together are able to effectively capture the spatio-temporal trend in the landscape pattern associated with urbanization in this region.