The relative evaluation of land use and land cover for various uses such as forest, agriculture and water bodies etc. is the important issue in the semiarid region. Application of Remote Sensing technology for Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change analysis has been carried out in semi-arid region of Madhya Pradesh, central part of India and found that the use of remote sensing along with Survey of India toposheets could be used appropriately for LULC mapping. The semi-arid regions are characterized by erratic rainfall and high rate of vegetation dynamics. The increasing biotic pressure together with increasing human demands exerts pressure on the available land resources all over the region. Therefore, in order to have best possible use of land, it is not only necessary to have the information on the existing LULC, but also to monitor the dynamic land use resulting because of increasing demands aroused from the growing population. Continuous overexploitation of natural resources like land, water, and forest has caused serious threat to the local population of the semi-arid region. This causes problems like little scope for soil moisture storage, high rate of soil erosion, declining groundwater level and shortage of drinking water
Identifying hotspots in land use land cover change and the drivers in a semi-arid region of India
