SPATIO-TEMPORAL ANALYSIS OF LAND USE DYNAMICS AND ITS POTENTIAL IMPLICATIONS ON LAND SURFACE TEMPERATURE IN LAHORE DISTRICT, PUNJAB, PAKISTAN

Abstract. The rapid population growth and the urge in people to move to big cities for their settlement upshot in urban expansion. While stepping into the corridor of the 21st century, the utility of remote sensing and GIS techniques in various fields has made things understandable and thus enhances the ways of investigation for better decision making and management. The paper presents the Landsat Satellite series based Land Surface Temperature retrieval concerning land use/ land cover changes over Lahore District, Punjab, Pakistan. The Spatio-temporal analysis was performed from 1980–2020. We availed high-resolution Landsat and Sentinel-2 Satellite imagery to perform Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and Supervised classification. Cloud-free satellite data was acquired from June, July, or August. Data pre-processing including atmospheric and terrain corrections were performed using ERDAS Imagine. The Red, NIR, and Thermal bands were utilized for LST estimation. ArcGIS 10.22 was used for making maps, analysis, and interpretations. The Spatio-temporal analysis of LULC and LST for the area indicates a great urbanization trend over the past forty years. People are migrating from small towns and villages to the metropolitan city of Pakistan for their livelihoods, and settlements. The built-up/urban land has expanded over the period with excessive construction that has affected the Land surface temperature. The area where human activity has increased shows higher LST’s as compared to green lands. The excessive construction has taken off the agricultural land, while the River Ravi still flows with a changing course and less water table. The COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 put everything on lockdown had an impact on environmental restoration due to fewer emissions and human activities. The overall classification accuracy of the images yielded substantial-high Kappa statistics of 80 %, 88%, 82%, 82.41%, and 87.76% for 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and the 2020 images, respectively. The unplanned urbanization is leading the Lahore District to serious environmental issues and climate change impacts. The need of the hour is to properly plan and manage the area for the coming generations to have a healthier and sustainable place to breathe in.