Estimating Advance of Built-Up Area in Desert-Oasis Ecotone of Cholistan Desert Using Landsat

Sami Ullah, Yan Shi (), Muhammad Yousaf Sardar Dasti, Muhammad Wajid and Zulfiqar Ahmad Saqib ()
Additional contact information
Sami Ullah: School of Geo-Sciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha 410012, China
Yan Shi: School of Geo-Sciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha 410012, China
Muhammad Yousaf Sardar Dasti: School of Geo-Sciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha 410012, China
Muhammad Wajid: School of Geo-Sciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha 410012, China
Zulfiqar Ahmad Saqib: Institute of Soil and Environmental Sciences, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad 38040, Pakistan

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 5, 1-13

Abstract: There have been few attempts to estimate the effects of land use and land cover (LULC) on ecosystem services in desert-oasis ecotones, which are recognized as critical ecological barriers and buffers that prevent deserts from expanding into oases. This research investigated how remote sensing and geographic information technology may be used to monitor changes in LULC in the Cholistan desert and the Bahawalpur region of Pakistan between the years 2015 and 2022. The objective of this research was to identify thematic and statistical shifts in LULC in the study area due to various human interventions in the area. Landsat-8 images were processed using the maximum likelihood supervised classification technique using 500 training samples to categorize the study area into four LULC classes, i.e., desert/barren land, waterbodies, vegetation, and built-up areas, with an overall accuracy of 93% and 98% for 2015 and 2022, respectively. Results indicate a significant expansion in built-up area in 2022, which is up to 43%, agriculture and vegetation area declined by 8%, waterbodies decreased by 41%, and desert area decreased by 2% when compared with 2015. The change detection approach revealed that agricultural land was directly encroached on by rapidly increasing built-up area and urbanization as the area had an overall 19% rise in population growth within eight years with an annual growth rate of more than 3%. This study will be helpful to assess the quantity of spatial and temporal changes in the desert ecosystem, which is usually ignored by policymakers and governments due to less economic activity, although it plays a huge role in biodiversity conservation and balancing the regional ecosystem.

Keywords: remote sensing; land use; land cover; arid; ecosystem; desert (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/12/5/1009/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/12/5/1009/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:12:y:2023:i:5:p:1009-:d:1139159

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().