REVIEW OF LITERATURE

In the recent decades, global population growth and urbanization increase rapidly and increase the demand of land that is the major problem of most of the developing cities. Land use planning is widely accepted way to handle complex problem of resources and urbanization it involve the use of available information change / cover features: Land use changes and covers Land use / land cover (LULC) changes are affected by human intervention and natural phenomena such as agricultural demand and trade, population growth and consumption patterns, urbanization and economic development, science and technology, and other factors (Research on Land use change & Agriculture, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 2007). Land in urban areas are strongly influenced by anthropogenic activities, considerably more attention is currently being directed towards monitoring changes in urban land use and land cover (Stow & Chen, 2002). Agricultural practices are one of the major causes of human induced land use changes and exert a significant pressure on natural resources through the consumption of water, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, their influence on soils, water quality and greenhouse gases emission (EEA, 2007a).Remote sensing data provide valuable multi-temporal data on the processes and patterns of LULC change, and GIS is useful for mapping and analyzing these patterns (Zhang et al., 2002). Urban areas are strongly influenced by anthropogenic activities, considerably more attention is currently being directedtowards monitoring changes in urban land use and land cover (LULC) (Stow & Chen, 2002). Land-use and land-cover mapping Land is one of the prime natural resources. Urban population growth and urban-sprawl induced land use changes coupled with industrial development are resulting in unplanned use as well as misuse of land leading to conversion of usable land into wastelands. The changes of land use/landcover pattern over a time period control the pressure on land (Sengupta and Venkatachalam, 2001). for the improvement of public activity relating to human environment and general welfare. Several authors attempt to better observe and define land use

The complexity of urban development is so dynamic that it calls for an immediate perspective planning of cities and towns (Sokhi and Rashid, 1999). The remote sensing technology along with GIS is an ideal tool to identify, locate and map various types of lands associated with different landform units (Dhinwa, 1992; Palaniyandi and Nagarathinam, 1997; Murthy and Venkateswara, 1997; Khan et al., 1999). The timely information about the changing pattern of land use plays significant role in land use planning and sustainable land development. The mapping and monitoring of the land use/land cover requires a land use classification system.

Prasad and Sinha (2002) describe the image characteristics and visual interpretation techniques of various land-cover and land-use categories

Land-cover/land- use 1. Settlements

Image characteristics Light grey clustering with particular patterns for the urban area. There may be brownish maroon patches for in between vegetation. For the rural settlement there occur no particular patterns of such image characteristics. Identify rabi if the month of data acquisition is January or February or March and colour is brown red. (a) For the kharif crops same characteristics in image occur if the image data are acquired in the month of September, October or November. (b) Fallow land is identified by light grey colour within cropped area (red colour). (c) Plantation occurs as brownish maroon patches. Dense forests are identified by dark red colour patterns. In the case of degraded forest the dark red colour patterns contain small brown or white patches. The blanks in the forest show creamy patches in the dark red/background. Forest

2. Agriculture

3. Forest (a) Dense forests (b) Degraded forest (c) Forest blank (d) Forest plantation

plantations are identified by dark red colour sign 4. Waste Land (a) Muddy water logging (b) Clear water logging (c) Temporary water logging (d) Permanent water logging (e) Marshy area water logging (f) Gullied land (g) Land with scrub (h) Land without scrub (i) Sandy area of particular pattern. Muddy water logging occurs as blackish or deep blue spots while clear water logging area is identified by dark/bright blue patches. Comparing the images of rainy season and out of rainy season identifies temporary and permanent water logging. Marshy area is recognized as a sign of vegetation (red/pink spots) in the water logged (blackish blue/bright blue) area. Gullied land occurs as white/grey spot. The image of land with scrub contains white patches in the land area. Sandy area is classified as bright white coloration along the 5. Water bodies (a) River/stream (b) Canal (c) Lake/ reservoirs (d) Embankments course of river. River/stream is identified as long non-linear path coloured with dark blue/bright blue line in white background. Canals are identified as line segments sign of water bodies. Lake/reservoirs are identified as patterns along the river. Embankment occurs as light grey structure 6. Others along the river. Grasslands are identified as uneven appearance characterized by red (light to medium grey tones) Snow is identified as white patches on the hills. Source: Prasad and Sinha (2002)

Land use changes Detection and conversion Land use changes (LUC) that occurred in recent decades have been analysed using three different land use maps developed by the Cartographic Department of the Emilia Romagna Region for the

reference years 1976, 1994 and 2003, applying them to the selected study area using the ESRI Arc View 3.2 GIS software. This has been performed through the application of the methodology developed by Bertozzi et al. (1993). The method consists in a thematic generalisation of the land use categories of each map, through the definition of a unique set of land use categories. As confirmed by Petit and Lambin (2002), even though this technique has some limitations (Coppin and Bauer, 1996; Singh, 1989), it is the most appropriate method to compare data from different sources, as each data layer can be generalized to a common landcover scheme before comparison. Land use conversions are defined and classified as the changes in land use class that occurred in a given area. These classes identify the typology of changes by assigning a land use conversion label to each intersection created by the overlay of successive land use maps, allowing a thematic representation of the spatial distribution of changes. The method is based on the previous generalisation of land use categories and offers a quantitative and qualitative measure of conversion that occurred in the study area, allowing the spatial distribution of land use changes to be reported on a unique map (Benini et al. 2010). Land-use suitability analysis One of the most useful applications of GIS for planning and management is the landuse suitability mapping and analysis (McHarg, 1969; Hopkins, 1977; Brail and Klosterman, 2001; Collins et al., 2001). Broadly defined, land use suitability analysis aims at identifying the most appropriate spatial pattern for future land uses according to specify requirements, preferences, or predictors of some activity (Hopkins, 1977; Collins et al., 2001). The GIS-based land-use suitability analysis has been applied in a wide variety of situations including ecological approaches for defining land suitability/habitant for animal and plant species (Pereira and Duckstein, 1993; Store and Kangas, 2001), geological favorability (Bonham-Carter, 1994), suitability of land for agricultural activities (Cambell et al., 1992; Kalogirou, 2002), landscape evaluation and planning (Miller et al., 1998), environmental impact assessment (Moreno and Seigel, 1988), selecting the best site for the public and private sector facilities (Eastman et al., 1993; Church, 2002), and regional planning (Janssen and Rietveld, 1990). This monograph focuses on land-use suitability analysis as applied to urban/regional/ environmental planning and management rather than agricultural/ecological/geological applications.

The GIS-based approaches to land-use suitability analysis have their roots in the applications of hand-drawn overlay techniques used by American landscape architects in the late nineteenth and early 20th century (Steinitz et al., 1976; Collins et al., 2001). The overlay procedures play a central role in many GIS applications (OSullivan and Unwin, 2003) including techniques that are in the forefront of the advances in the land-use suitability analysis such as: multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) (Diamond and Wright, 1988; Carver, 1991; Malczewski, 1999; Thill, 1999), artificial intelligence (AI) (geocomputation) methods (Sui, 1993; Zhou and Civco, 1996; Ligtenberg et al., 2001; Xiao et al., 2002), visualization methods (Jankowski et al., 2001), and Web-GIS (Carver and Peckham, 1999; Zhu and Dale, 2001; Rinner and Malczewski, 2003).