LAND-USE AND LAND-COVER MONITORING IN THE HAOR REGION OVER THE LAST 40 YEARS USING HISTORICAL LANDSAT SATELLITE IMAGERY

Abstract

ABSTRACT Land-use and land-cover change is a common and prominent feature in the haor region such as Sunamganj district. The Sunamganj district harbors a large number of wetlands and haors. The aim of this research was to prepare time-laps land-use and land-cover map for every 10 years since 1978 and to analyze and understand the long-term dynamics of land-use/land-cover changes from 1978 to 2018 period of Sunamganj haor region using historical Landsat satellite imagery. 1978, 1988, 1998, 2009 and 2018 images were obtained from http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov. Ground truth data were created using historical Google Earth images, which were primarily utilized to improve supervised classification and accuracy assessments. Maximum likelihood supervised classifications were undertaken in ArcGIS (Version 10.5) for classification. Each image was classified into four land-use classes: Water Body, Tree cover, Agricultural Land and Other. The accuracy assessment showed that the classification was relatively acceptable and effective in detecting the long-term land-use changes in Sunamganj haor region. It was found that around 245 Km² water body had lost and 870.5 Km² agricultural land had increased from 1978 to 2018. Tree cover class showed increasing and decreasing trend and around 818 Km² other land class had lost from 1978 to 2018. Higher levels of deforestation, combined with population growth and cropland expansion have impacted on Sunamganj haor region. These findings clearly show that the ecosystems of the haor are being harmed as a result of a scarcity of adequate monitoring and management.