REMOTE SENSING OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL LANDSCAPE: A STUDY OF GREEN COVER LUNGS OF DELHI AND SURROUNDING CITY REGIONS

Abstract. The remote sensing satellites have now a days been used for creation of geospatial databases of the earth surface features and natural resources as the land use land cover mapping and monitoring periodically at the local, regional, and global levels using geospatial technologies. The Land cover consider to the type of features present on the surface of the earth. Whereas, the land use considers to the human activity or the economic function associated with a specific piece of land. The supervised classification based on the maximum likelihood classifier technique has been applied to process the digital multi-spectral imagery for LULC classification. The built-up area was about 11.95 per cent in 1977 which increased to 19.74 per cent in 1999 and further increased to about 24.54 per cent in 2009. So, the urban landscape’s urban built-up land was composed by areas of intensive use with much of land covered by built-up structures. The cities, towns, villages, strip development along highways; transportation, power, and communication facilities; shopping centres, industrial and commercial complexes, and institutions found located in the urban areas have been developed over the periods. The forests cover area accounted to about 1.43 per cent in 1977 which increased to about 10.04 per cent in 1999. The forest cover regeneration over the Delhi Ridge recognized as a significant contributor to carbon sequestration, micro-climate change, biodiversity restoration for the Delhi’s urban development and rejuvenation of environmental landscape. So, the remote sensing imagery have commonly been used for urban landscape monitoring and environmental modelling for sustainable development of Delhi and adjoining city regions.