Evaluating Land Use Land Cover (LULC) and Urban Built-up Growth Using NDBI: A study of Itanagar Capital Region (ICR), Arunachal Pradesh, India

Abstract

Itanagar Capital Region (ICR) is more commonly referred to as the capital of Arunachal Pradesh. Over the past few decades, ICR has undergone a wide range of changes Land Use and Land Cover (LULC). The present paper divulges with aim examine the status of LULC and urban built-up growth using geo-spatial tools. Landsat 5, 8 and 9 images from different years have been utilised with a time span of 10 years from 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016, and 2024. The Land use and land cover information was extracted from the satellite images using the Maximum Likelihood Classification algorithm through Supervised image classification in ArcGIS 10.8. The LULC has been done in six classes as waterbodies, dense forest, bare land, shrubland/open forest, built-up and agriculture. Accuracy assessment has been carried out for validating the supervised images. The result shows that there is a decrease in the area of dense forest, open forest, and agricultural land, while built-up area land increased between 1986-2024. From 1.74% (3.72 Km2) to 30.2% (64.58 Km2) in 2024. Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) has also been used to evaluate built-up and non-built-up areas. The evaluation indicates a sharp rise of 4.82 Km2 (2.25%) built-up in 1986 to 49.10 Km2 (22.96%) built-up in 2024 within a span of 38 years. The change in built-up is attributed to factors like population explosion, socio-economic change, land use transformation, urban built-up and urbanization. A GIS spatio-temporal study provides crucial data on the transformation of the rapidly urbanizing environmentally sensitive mountainous urban centre located in the frontiers of India. The study findings align with providing a road map towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 11 which to build sustainable cities and communities particularly in sensitive Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh.