Vikas Pandey and Dharmendra Kumar Singh
Abstract
Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change is a major driver of landscape transformation and environmental degradation in rapidly urbanizing regions of India. The present study investigates decadal LULC changes in Mathura District, Uttar Pradesh, from 2014 to 2024 using multi-temporal Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellite imagery. Supervised Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC) was applied to classify six major LULC classes, namely water bodies, permanent vegetation, built-up areas, barren land, cropland/fallow land, and sandbars. The classification results achieved overall accuracies of 84.26% (2014) and 88.10% (2024), with Kappa coefficients of 0.803 and 0.846, respectively, indicating reliable classification performance. Change detection analysis revealed substantial expansion of built-up areas (51.58%) and cropland/fallow land (8.77%) during the study period, accompanied by a significant decline in permanent vegetation (36.01%). Sandbars exhibited the highest relative increase (174.42%), reflecting active fluvial geomorphic processes along the Yamuna River corridor. The findings indicate accelerated anthropogenic pressure in the district, primarily due to urban growth and agricultural intensification, leading to significant vegetation loss and landscape alteration. The study highlights the effectiveness of Landsat-based remote sensing and GIS techniques for long-term LULC monitoring and provides critical insights to support sustainable land-use planning and environmental management in the Mathura region.