K. Sundara Kumar, Assoc. Prof, M. HARIKA, SK. ASPIYA BEGUM, S. YAMINI, K. BALAKRISHNA, B.Tech students of Civil Engineering Dept has authored a paper and was published in RITS International Conference On Advancements In Engineering And Technology

Land-use and land-cover change, as one of the main driving forces of global environmental change, is central to the sustainable development debate. Urban expansion has brought serious losses of agriculture land, vegetation land and water bodies. Urban sprawl is responsible for a variety of urban environmental issues like decreased air quality, increased runoff and subsequent flooding, increased local temperature, deterioration of water quality, etc. In this work we have taken Hyderabad city is taken as a case to study the urban expansion and land cover change that took place in a span of 22 years from 1989 to 2011. Remote sensing methodology is adopted to study the geographical land use changes occurred during the study period. Landsat images of TM and ETM+ of Hyderabad city area are

collected from the USGS Earth Explorer web site. After image pre-processing, un-supervised and supervised image classification has been performed to classify the images in to different land use categories. Five land use classes have been identified as Urban (Built-up), Water body, Agricultural land, Barren land and Vegetation. Classification accuracy is also estimated using the field knowledge obtained from field surveys and Google earth. The obtained accuracy is between 80 to 85 percent for all the classes. Change detection analysis shows that Built-up area has been increased by 86.35%, Open land has been increased by 139.6%, Agricultural area has been decreased by 24.25% and water bodies are reduced by 53.41%. Information on urban growth, land use and land cover change study is very useful to local government and urban planners for the betterment of future plans of sustainable development of the city.

Keywords: Land use / Land cover, Urban Sprawl, Urbanization, Remote sensing, Landsat data