Introduction

Land use land cover (LULC) changes are the strongest drivers of habitat loss, ecosystem alterations and biodiversity changes in forest dominated landscapes. These changes locally alter the ecosystem and globally induce the climate change. LULC changes are driven by the interaction of ecological, geographical, economic, and social factors (Zang and Huang, 2006) in the process of landscape development (Bürgi et al., 2004; Hersperger and Burgi, 2009). These change is always depends on combination of factors specific to that region (Geist and Lambin, 2002, 2006). The temporal data of a region will provides broader view of the LULC changes (Aguayo et al 2009) and its factors. This approach will result whether any natural process also has any impact for the change. Natural disturbances tend to alter forest landscape pattern differently from anthropogenic impacts (Mladenoff, 1993), human induced impacts are quantified as more effect between patches as compared natural change (Hudak et al. (2007). Land degradation caused by LULC change leads to substantial decrease in the biological productivity of the land system, resulting from human activities rather than natural events (Johnson & Lewis, 2006).  Loss of natural vegetation cover is often a precedent to soil erosion and decline of the water storage capacity; these modifications of the land system may lead to desertification due to longer term factors such as climate change, triggering short term degradation of ecosystems by humans (Reynolds & Stafford Smith, 2002). Among the human and natural processes occurring in the area, deforestation has been the most important in terms of its spatial extent (Carmona et al., 2010). Forest degradation through logging also has been an important cause of forest loss (Armesto et al., 2009). Disturbance in forested landscapes is referred as fragmentation where forested habitat is reduced into an increasing number of smaller, more isolated, patches (Wilcove et al., 1986). These changes can result in a modification of the microclimate within and surrounding the remnant, intact forest patches (Saunders et al., 1991) and a change in forest ecosystem function and condition (Wickham et al., 2008). Alteration of former natural areas due to human land use can strongly influence biodiversity and ecosystem services (Lindenmayer and Fischer, 2006). The principle information  of how LULC changes varies both temporally and spatially and how it affects landscape structure and forest age is extremely important for managing ecosystem services and species conservation (Echeverria et al., 2006; Barlow et al., 2007). Understanding of landscape dynamics and the historic range of variability in ecosystems, key impact of disturbance factors should be considered. Current understanding of the levels and severity of forest change and fragmentation remains incomplete because of not considering all the aspects which are responsible for this change.

Understanding the dynamics of landscape has become important concern from various disciplines, such as landscape ecology, biodiversity conservation and landscape planning. Spatio temporal data acquired through space-borne remote sensors provide a solution due to its efficiency in identification and problem solving approaches. The advantages of remote sensing data is to detect measure and monitor land cover change due to its ability to capture an instantaneous synoptic view of a large part of the Earth's surface and acquire repeated measurements of the same area on a regular basis. Remote sensing data at various temporal scales followed by spatial analysis using GIS technology provides an opportunity to effectively monitor and evaluate the impacts of change over a range of scales, intervals than is possible with expensive and detailed field surveys (Ramachandra et al., 2011; Ramachandra et al 2012). The spectral response of vegetation indices will detects changes in pixel-level vegetation conditions (Leckie et al., 2005; Wulder et al., 2005).