Monitoring dynamics of land use/ land cover changes of the river Yamuna in upper stretch using multi-temporal satellite data

This paper describes the methodology and results of classifications of multi-temporal Landsat 4-5 Thematic Mapper data of the River Yamuna in upper stretch, India for the years 1999 and 2011 respectively. Seven different land cover/use categories have been used, named built-up Area/settlement, forest, agricultural land, scrub land, wetlands, river/streams/drains and railways. The overall classification accuracies were 78.46% and 81.23% and Kappa as 0.7470 and 0.7795 for the year 1999 and 2011 respectively. One of the important results for the classifications is the decrease in agricultural land and forest areas and a considerable increase in built-up area as a result of anthropogenic activities in the study area. The classifications have provided an economical and accurate way to quantify, map and analyze changes over time in land cover.