A Study of Land Cover Change Detection in Oddusuddan DS Division of Mullaitivu District in Sri Lanka based on GIS and RS Technology

Abstract

Land cover change analysis between 1997 and 2016 was conducted in Oddusuddan Divisional Secretariat, Mullaitivu District, using remote sensing and geographic information system incorporated with field verifications. Various Satellite images and different digital maps have been used for extracting information. The overall Objective of this study was to detect the magnitude of land cover change in Oddusuddan between 1997 and 2016. The methodology of this study was a change detection analysis of satellite imagery with Landsat ETM data. Two dates of Landsat image data of the 1997 and 2016 were used to produce land cover map. The Maximum Likelihood algorithm was used for supervised classification to detect changes over period of twenty years. The result showed that during the last twenty years, the forest cover declined from 453.02 km2 in 1997 to 447.14 km2 in 2016. It was noticed that socioeconomic factors were the major driving forces for the land cover change.