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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

URBAN CHANGE MONITORING USING GIS AND REMOTE SENSING TOOLS IN KATHMANDU VALLEY (NEPAL)

by  Sushil Bhandari

The urbanization pattern during the period of 1989 to 2006 of Kathmandu valley was studied using Landsat data. The main aims of the study were to apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing tools for the study of land use and land cover classification, change analysis and urban growth model for 2019 of the Kathmandu valley. The study also reviewed population growth and urbanization trends in connection with increasing built up areas leading to the environmental degradation. The population growth and urbanization trend of Kathmandu valley was the highest among other cities in Nepal. Principal component analysis was applied to spectrally enhance images to get the better image classification results. Images were classified in six land use and land cover classes using supervised classification and maximum likelihood algorithm which were then re-classed into built up and non-built up to focus on urbanization. The analysis showed that the built up area had grown up to 134% in 2006 since 1989. The assessed overall accuracies for the classification of three images were between 86 to 89 percentages. Cellular Automata Markov (CA_MARKOV) and GEOMOD modeling programs were used to project the 2006 and then 2019 land use and land cover classes. The 2019 land use and land covers was projected after satisfactory validation of projected 2006 land classes resulting with Kappa more than 0.55 up to 0.75. The future projection of land classes did not show that the urban growth will have significant effects to the designated areas. However, there will be some effects in water bodies. The Landsat images along with other ancillary data proved to be useful for the overall study.


Kathmandu, Nepal, photo by Happy Sleepy
Kathmandu Valley, by Hoorob

more about GIS:

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Urban Sprawl beyond Growth: from a Growth to a Decline Perspective on the Cost of Sprawl

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A GIS-based gradient analysis of urban landscape pattern of Shanghai metropolitan area, China

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APPLICATION OF REMOTE SENSING AND GIS TECHNIQUE FOR EFFICIENT URBAN PLANNING IN INDIA

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