An Assessment of Urban Expansion Impacts on Land Transformation of Rajpur-Sonarpur Municipality

Abstract

Urban expansion, population pressure, and increasing industrialization are influenced the world's natural environment, increased climate change, and global warming. Land use and land cover (LULC) changes are occurring due to anthropogenic activities and the results are land transformation, thermal variation, heat stress, and massive vegetation loss, which is increased oxygen deficiency and air pollution. Remote sensing-based Landsat TM and OLI/TIRS data were used to identify the land transformation and the effect of urbanization in Rajpur-Sonarpur Municipality in the years 2000 and 2020. The Built-up land was increased due to anthropogenic activities and around 12.16% area has been increased. Similarly, the agricultural land has been increased by 2.10 km2 area and vegetation area has been decreased around 6.52 km2 in the study area. The vegetation degradation areas were located in the South, South-west, and central parts of this study area. Correspondingly, North, North-west and central parts have a noticeable amount of built-up area developed. During twenty years, 6.97°C temperature was increased due to urban expansion, population pressure, transportation accessibility, and other urban amenities. The overall accuracies of classification maps were 96.25% and 91.64 % and the kappa coefficients were 0.95 and 0.89 respectively.