Geographical analysis

Abstract

Abstract Land Use / Land Cover Change is increasingly recognized as being an important driver of Global Environmental Change. Current technologies such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) provide a cost effective and accurate alternative to understanding landscape dynamics. The study focuses on the analysis of urban growth trend, examines the land use/land cover change and predicts the urban growth patterns by using the Markov Chain models at Chennai Metropolitan Area over the time period of 15 years and prediction of 2021 has been adopted. The correlation analysis is used to find the relationship between urban built-up, population growth and land value of Chennai Metropolitan. Chennai Metropolitan Area shows a rapid increase in urbanization from 1991 to 2006. Urbanization shows expanding the area of urban built-up. Despite from the horizontal expansion the density or thickness of built-up land is increasing in existing urban lands. Both Vegetation cover and Water bodies in Chennai Metropolitan is gradually decreasing. The projected Land Use / Land Cover for 2021 shows that Chennai Metropolitan area should be dominated by Built-up lands and the area covered by Vegetation will show a steep decline. The Land value analysis shows that Land value is increase is faster than the process of urbanization.

Key words: Land Use / Land Cover, Urbanization, Marcove Chain, Horizontal expansion, Vertical expansion.