Analysing land use land cover (LULC) changes using remote sensing (RS) and GIS approach in Bundelkhand Region of Central India

LULC changes present the importance of watershed development program in agricultural land at watershed scale through interventions of various water harvesting structures especially in arid and semi-arid tropics. Bundelkhand region is a semi-arid tropic and hub of drought in Central India due to erratic rainfall, undulated topography and lack of water conservation practices. The study of last 20 years (2000-2019) revealed that 10 are severe drought years, 5 normal and 5 excess rainfall years. Under such circumstances, various water conservation practices were adopted and analysing their impacts through land use land cover map. Analysing landuse land cover using RS and GIS is a vital to investigate land use patterns and helping forecast for future sustainable land management and therefore, Garhkundar-Dabar(GKD) watershed located inTikamgrah district of Madhya Pradesh,Bundelkhand region of Central India was selected for the study.During the study, watershed is divided into two groups (first treated watershed and second control watershed) for hydrological study but in this study treated watershed is preferred based on objective.All the cloud free Landsat 7 and 8 imagery data pertaining to year 1999 to 2019 were downloaded from USGS and digitized in GIS environment in Arc GIS 10.3. In this study, LULC was prepared by using ERDAS Imagine 9.2 from 1999 to 2019 under supervised classification. The overall accuracy was found 86.7% for 1999, 88.3% for 2007 and 89.7% for 2019. The analysis revealed a huge transformation of fallow land (90 ha) into cultivated land (265 ha) and agroforestry based crop cultivation willingnessenhanced. Thus water conservation practices should be adopted and replicated at watershed scale for sustainable land management in drought prone areas.