Land Use and Land Cover Change and Its Environmental Implications in Berhampore Municipality, West Bengal

Abstract: Rapid urbanization in small and medium cities of India is causing significant changes in land use and land cover (LULC) in rapid ways. The current study analyses land use changes in Berhampore Municipality of Murshidabad district of West Bengal between 2016, 2020 and 2025 using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery with spatial resolution of 10m. Only four LULC categories were identified e.g. water bodies, vegetation cover, built-up areas and open land from respective images. To achieve better classification accuracy, we have considered all the reflective bands along with some index oriented classification output. The results show that built-up area has increased from 41.81% in 2016 to 53.93% in 2025. On the contrary, open land has decreased from 27.85% to 16.61%. There has also been a steady decline in water bodies and vegetation cover over the study area due to growing inflow of rural urban migration. These changes are posing serious environmental challenges in terms of wetland health, urban heat island effect (UHI), waterlogging, and sustainable urban development. Lastly, this study emphasizes the need of integrated land use planning discission considering the environmental conservation and also for forecasting possible future change in growth pattern. Keywords: Land Use Land Cover, Urbanization, GIS, Remote Sensing, Berhampore Municipality, Sustainable Development