Land Use/Land Cover and NDVI Analysis for Monitoring the Health of Micro-watersheds of Sarada River Basin, Visakhapatnam District, India

The study has been undertaken to map the land use/land cover resource at a micro-watershed level in the Sarada river basin covering an area of 2634 km2. Multi-temporal remote sensing data acquired by the Landsat-7 ETM+ satellite sensor of 30m spatial resolution and IRS-P6 LISS-III satellite sensor of 23.5m resolution, respectively has been used for the study. Change analysis of the land use/land cover pattern in the basin was carried out to identify the impact of anthropogenic activities in each of the 60 micro-watersheds of the basin. The study has appraised the fact that, land use/land cover changes are affected by factors, such as, population growth, agricultural demand (food, bio-energy, forest, etc.), urbanization and economic development in the Sarada river basin. Simultaneously, NDVI was used to broadly monitor the vegetative vigor and imperviousness of the micro-watersheds. The combination of land use/land cover and NDVI analysis helped in identifying and measuring the impact of human induced change which may alter the hydrological setting, behaviour and environment of the Sarada river basin.