ABSTRACT

Land use changes are irreversible changes and directly influence the regional and global environmental quality. Urbanisation is one of the major drivers of land use land cover (LULC) changes. Planned urbanisation would help in maintaining the environmental quality and sustenance of natural resources while meeting the demand of population in cities. However, unplanned urbanization in most of the rapidly urbanising cities has caused serious concerns in both environmental quality and on human’s livelihood due to urban sprawl. Urban sprawl refers to the uncoordinated land use resulting from lack of integrated and holistic approach in regional planning. Information related to the rate of growth, pattern and extent of sprawl is required by urban planners to provide basic amenities. This paper discusses land cover and land use dynamics of Belgaum a tier II city in Karnataka. Temporal land use dynamics is assessed for urbanizing landscape - Belgaum city with a buffer of 5 km. Vegetation over changes have been analysed using slope based vegetation indices NDVI, which show 91.74% vegetationin 2012. Temporal land use analysis for the period 2006 to 2012 show that urban area has increased from 4.81% to 5.74%.

Keywords: Land use, Land cover, Urbanisation, Belgaum, IRS.