Geospatial Techniques for Quantitative Analysis of Urban Expansion and the Resulting Land Use Change along the Chennai Outer Ring Road (ORR) Corridor

Abstract

Urbanization measures how quickly rural regions are becoming urban. The alteration in land use and land cover in the impacted area through time has been represented by the growing scale of urban growth and its related sprawl. The aim of the study is to use remote sensing and GIS to assess the land cover changes brought on by urban growth on route via the Outer Ring Road. The land cover maps are created for the four regions of Nazarathpettai, Meppur, Chikkarayapuram, and Perungalathur for the years2009, 2012, and 2016. The seven groups of land covered by the land cover maps—agriculture, bare ground, houses, businesses, bodies of water, other vegetation, and marshland— are examined for changes (swamp). Additionally, changes in area-based land cover, environmental factors (such as changes in green cover), and economic factors are examined in the four segments' maps of land cover. 2009, 2012, and 2016 are three years when, the urban growth of the Outer Ring Road corridor's Chikkarayapuram, Nazarathpettai, Meppur, and Perungalathur segment was (5.16%, 20.10%,14.31%, 30.62%, 13.9%, and 22.18%; 7.14%; and 12.63%; and 19.67%; and 33.1%; and 23.22%; and 40.27%), respectively. Urban settings have grown by 20, 76,530 sq. m between 2009 and 2016. 12,62,700 square meters have been removed from the agricultural zones between 2009 and 2016. Additionally, simulated maps Based on the land cover maps from the three years (2009, 2012, and 2016), projections for the year 2022 were created using the MOLUSCE plugin in open-source GIS (QGIS). These projections were then confirmed using ground-truth data collected from Google Earth. This validation led to an estimate of an urban growth rate relative to the total land area of about 53.95%.