Research on agriculture: Agriculture lands vs development

Chennai: Institute of Remote Sensing (IRS) in Anna University plans to study land use and land cover change during the last five years in Tamil Nadu using satellite images.

The study will reveal how much agricultural land is decreasing and how to plan the development in the state, according to the changing land use. This is the third cycle of study of land use and land cover analysis and it is sponsored by National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) in Hyderabad.

This project is aimed at updating land use and land cover vector of 2011-12. The project team will get three seasons of 2015-16 data from Resourcesat-2 LISS III satellite. They will identify and depict the areas with major changes from 2011-12 to 2015-16.

“We will start the study at the end of this month and it will take at least one year to identify the changes in the land use for the entire state which is spread over 1.30 lakh square km,” said C. Udhayakumar, associate professor, Institute of Remote Sensing, Anna University.

The researchers will split the state into smaller grids and study the satellite data, he said. IRS has already done two cycles of study in 2005-06 and 2011-12.

“We will manually interpret the data with the set of keys. From agriculture to wasteland we have set of keys for each category like tone, texture and colour of the image.  We will segregate the land use based on these keys,” said M. Navamuniyammal, assistant professor from Institute of Remote Sensing.

“Previously, we used to give the information on 1:50,000 scale (ratio of ground and map). Now we are going to give the information in 1:10,000 scale which will contain more clear data. Now, we can give more information like the details of the crop in the agriculture land,” she said.

The land use, land cover changes will be submitted both as map and report with the NRSC. It also will be shared with state government departments like state planning commission, public works department and agriculture engineering department.

“The report will be helpful to the future planning in the state. It also will reveal the current status of water bodies and how the water bodies are changed over a period of time,” she added. Anna University will give the watershed map to the NRSC and the state government along with the land use and land cover change map.

For verification of the satellite image, the research team will also take the photographs at the ground level. “We will deliver the geo-tagged photographs for the land use and land cover change areas and it will be uplinked to Bhuvan website through the mobile application provided by NRSC,” Udhayakumar said.