Abstract :
Urbanization has become a hot issue in context of environmental and socio-political
scenarios which is addressed at every forum internationally. The mega cities are considered
the main origin of socio-economic development which caused to emerge a number of issues
like biodiversity, environmental degradation, resource consumption, implementation of law
and order and provision of basic facilities to the general public. The area under investigation
consists of Lahore, Gujranwala and Sheikhupura. The study site was bounded by 73-75 E
longitudes and 31-33 N latitudes. We used Landsat satellite data to map Spatio-temporal
variations in urban sprawl from 1990 to 2019 with a temporal window of 15 years. The Landsat
data is free, highly reliable and considered as primary source. The classification results show
that the total area of study site was site was 29355 km2
including 21933km2 were green index
4595 km2 was under human settlements and 2827 km2 was the waterbody in 1990. The
classification of Landsat image of the year 2005 describes that area of human settlements was
increased to 9366 km2
, the volume of water body was reduced to 2111km2
and the vegetation
was also degraded to 17878km2
. Again, the urban area was computed using satellite imagery
for the year 2019 which was 16105km2
in 2019. Kappa stat proved the accuracy of supervised
classification what was around 87%. Remotely sensed datasets proved the reliability of Landsat
satellite images for estimation of urban sprawl during last three decades.
Keyword :
socio-political development, Urban Sprawl, Landsat, Biodiversity, Classification.