Geospatial Analysis Of Land Use Land Cover Dynamics: A Study Of Jhargram District, India From 1993 To 2023

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) mapping and monitoring in any region with heterogeneous features is a challenging task. This study provides detailed spatiotemporal LULC mapping, change analysis with transitional dynamics from 1993-2023 for Jhargram district, West Bengal, India at decadal intervals using multi-temporal Landsat data. Supervised classification with the maximum-likelihood classifier technique is used. Pixel-based analysis was carried out to identify the gain, loss, and persistence of individual LULC classes as well as their transitional behavior. The results show forest, TOF (tree outside forest), and built-up showed increasing tread while fallow land and agriculture exhibited the reverse trend. The majority of the transition was found in ‘fallow to forest’ ‘fallow to agriculture’ and ‘agriculture to fallow’. The study provides information on change patterns and transition dynamics of LULC classes over three decades, which would be useful for forest conservation and sustainable development of the region.