Land use land cover mapping of West Garo Hills district of Meghalaya using Remote Sensing.

Abstract

Remote sensing technology is the powerful tool for mapping because of its wide area coverage, gives information about inaccessible area, timely repetitive coverage of the same area. However, the image analysis is a challenging task. Digital classification is not always efficient, particularly if there are extreme variations in land cover as it exists in north eastern part of the country. In this study, classical technique of visual interpretation along with image enhancement technique was adopted for classification. In addition to this, classification through unsupervised and supervised techniques has also been followed to compare the relative accuracies. The result shows that classical technique of visual interpretation is a better way to classify the land use/land cover particularly for the hilly region where the algorithm based classification fails due to the very undulating topographical condition and complex spectral signature of vegetation.