Monitoring Changes in Urban Cover Using Landsat Satellite Images and Demographical Information

The monitoring of urban cover is very important for the planner, management, governmental and non-governmental organizations for optimizing the use of urban resources and minimizing the environmental losses. The study here aims at analyzing the changes that occurred in urban green cover over a time span of 1991-2001 using multi-date Landsat satellite images data over the Varanasi district, India and its relation to demographical changes. The Support Vector Machines (SVMs) classifier has been used for image classification. The urbanization indicators such as Land Consumption Ratio (LCR) and Land Absorption Coefficient (LAC) were also used in order to understand the changes in urban cover and population dynamics. All the analysis indicates significant changes in the urban cover values with increasing population at both spatial and temporal scale.