Predicting the land use and land cover change using Markov model: A catchment level analysis of the Bhagirathi-Hugli River

Land use and land cover are important biophysical factors which have a major role in different terrestrial processes on the earth. Land use and land cover change are a vital element of global environmental change. It is very essential for regional development and land use management towards sustainable development. The different time's period satellite images in the study area have been studied to understand temporal as well as the spatial variability of land use and land cover (LULC) change. In this, an attempt was made to adopt the Markov model for obtaining and investigating the dynamics of land use change. Markov model was used as a stochastic model to make quantitative comparisons of the land-use changes between time periods extending from 2001 to 2010. Model performance was evaluated between the empirical LULC map obtained extracted from Landsat 8 (2017) image and the simulated LULC map obtained from the Markov model. The future land use distribution in the year 2019 and 2028 was acquired using a Markov model. This result shows that the Markov model and geospatial technology together are able to effectively capture the spatiotemporal trend in the landscape pattern in this study area.