5. Conclusions

Indian cities will continue to urbanise and as it does, our communities will continue to struggle with ways to accommodate economic growth while protecting natural resources and community character. In this context, the results obtained from the algorithms and models used here would be useful and relevant to render timely information to community decision makers. Orthogonal subspace projection could map the impervious surface accurately as is evident from various accuracy assessment methods. Forest fragmentation model and the urban growth model clearly show the change in type of land cover classes from vegetation to urban. Interior forest which was present in the city up to 54 % (in 1973) has come down to 28 % in 2006. Urban growth characterised by developed, infill, expansion and outlying types evidently illustrate the phenomenon of urbanising Greater Bangalore.

We thank Indian Institute of Science for financial and infrastructure support. NRSA, Hyderabad is acknowledged for providing LISS-III data. MODIS data were downloaded from http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml. Google earth data (http://earth.google.com) was used as reference data for image analysis.