Drivers and consequences of biophysical landscape change in a peri-urban-rural interface of Guwahati, Assam

North-east India is constituted of highly diverse ecosystems with unique characteristics with high dependency on primary sector income (86% on agriculture). It is very crucial to look into the issues like agriculture, ecosystem services and sociocultural aspects of endemic population, while urban areas are expanding. This paper examines the issues pertinent to peri-urban expansion with a case study from the biggest city of the region, Guwahati. The scope for sustainable development planning in peri-urban region through analysing spatial, economic, social, institutional and environmental aspects has been incorporated in this paper. Landscape research has been enhanced with temporal and spatial analysis of land-use and land-cover change for better landscape management. Remotely sensed data are the most important data source for land-cover change trajectories over three decades at three points of time (1991, 2001 and 2011) for the selected study landscape. This research explores the temporal composition of the main land-use land-cover classes. The major changes in land-use land-cover classes observed from the study are reduction in natural land cover (from 83.57 to 61.85%) and increase in built-up area (from 0.96 to 15.39%) and agricultural (from 6.01 to 15.59%) uses. Despite the intensification of agricultural land area, there has been decrease in agricultural livelihoods and subsequent reduction in income contribution from natural resource-based livelihoods. These findings on land-use land-cover change can be inferred as the impacts of peri-urbanization leading to degradation of agricultural land, deforestation, deterioration of wetland and wild habitat destruction.