Conclusion

Urbanisation process involves the increase in the population of cities in proportion to the region's rural population. This is happening in India at a very rapid pace with urban population growing at around 2.3 percent per annum. The dispersed development along in city outskirts and in rural countryside with implications such as loss of agricultural land, open space and ecologically sensitive habitats is referred as sprawl. Sprawl is thus a pattern and pace of land use in which the rate of land consumed for urban purposes exceeds the rate of population growth resulting in an inefficient and consumptive use of land and its associated resources. The study showed that Bangalore is rapidly expanding with a significant rise in built-up area. In this study multi-temporal analysis was done and landscape metrics were calculated to study the changes of landscape pattern. There has been a 13.35% urban growth in study area from 1999 to 2008. To detect landscape pattern and its changes landscape metrics were very useful. Results indicate that Urban patches were more dispersed in earlier years but patches are aggregating which showed that the study area becoming more compact in 2008. The city has become more aggregated as the number of patches decreased. This suggests that small patches have clumped together, thereby increasing the compactness of the city and decreasing the open spaces (decline of water bodies and vegetation). Understanding these spatio-temporal aspects of landscapes is very critical for effective regional planning.