Geospatial Analysis of Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics and its Impact on Urban Wetland Ecosystems in Delhi NCR Region, India

Urban wetlands are highly neglected and are encroached upon to accommodate more settlements or to dump waste materials. They are susceptible to encroachment and undergo Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) change thereby diminishing their value. This study aims to examine and assess the spatial-temporal LULC change for selected wetlands of Delhi NCR vis-à-vis ecosystem services. Landsat imageries for the years 1998, 2008 and 2018 are used to understand the change dynamics using supervised classification with overall accuracy of more than 80% for all years. Classification was done separately for Delhi NCR and 5 km buffer around the wetlands. In Delhi NCR the net percent change during the 20-year period was found to be +5.22% and +8.56% for built-up and cropland respectively. During the same period, the plantations/forest cover and water bodies changed by –8.30% and –0.50% respectively. Plantations/forest cover has shown a negative net percent change in six wetlands, with Najafgarh experiencing the highest (–10.75%), followed closely by Surajpur wetland (–10.68%), Bhalswa lake wetland (–9.93%), Yamuna Biodiversity Park (–6.77%), Pusa Hill Forest (–5.18%) and Asola Wildlife Sanctuary (–5.21%). The LULC change analysis has pointed to the loss of wetland area to built-up and/or cropland which is going to affect the ecosystem services provided by these wetlands. Geospatial tools are an important tool to understand the changing LULC in such sensitive ecosystems. It is needed to manage wetlands sustainably so that the corresponding ecosystem services could be preserved.