Assessment of Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Magnesite Mining Region, Salem, India

The land use and land cover information in the form of maps and statistical derived data has dealt with spatial planning, management and utilization of land. Digital image processing techniques can explore the changes of land use within the specified time period. Change detection technique used to determine land use and land cover changes in the magnesite mining area situated in Salem in different time periods from 1992 to 2010. The Landsat TM multi-temporal satellite data for the year 1992, 2001 and 2010 were utilized in the change detection analysis. Supervised classification method was employed using the maximum likelihood procedure in ENVI 4.7 software. The land use and land cover changes were observed through spatial data classification, statistical operations through relative changes, change matrix and accuracy assessment. The findings clearly depict that the changes in land use and land cover are due to mining activity in the study area. The results obtained in this study for the stipulated year’s shows that the increase in the mining area +2.35 sq.km affects the net change value of area of scrub forest by +10.77 sq.km and built-up land by +24.21 sq.km, hence reducing the dense forest by -12.98 sq.km and agricultural land by -24.34 sq.km area respectively. The relative changes are assessed with the aid of the raster image in pixels and the net change domain pixels evaluation for the period of 1992 - 2010. Error matrixes are function of cross tabulation and assess the classification accuracy. The current study reveals an overall accuracy of 78.82%.