LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMATION AND LAND-USE DYNAMICS IN THE JAMMU REGION:A SPATIO-TEMPORAL ANALYSIS OF JAMMU DISTRICT, INDIA

Abstract

Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) constitute one of the most sensitive and observable expressions of the interaction between human activity and the physical environment, and its systematic monitoring are fundamental to sustainable regional planning. This study presents a spatio-temporal assessment of LULC change in Jammu district, Jammu and Kashmir, India, over the decade 2011–2021, using multi-temporal Landsat satellite imagery (Landsat 7 ETM+ for 2011 and Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS for 2021) obtained from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Explorer archive. Six thematic band composites were generated and classified through supervised Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC) in a GIS environment into six land-cover classes — vegetation, agricultural land, built-up area, river bed, fallow land, and water bodies — following the USGS (Anderson et al., 1976) land-classification scheme. The classified layers were masked to the district boundary, and area statistics were compared between the two reference years to derive a quantitative change-detection matrix. The results reveal a pronounced landscape transformation: vegetation cover expanded from 40 per cent (940.38 km²) of the district in 2011 to 57 per cent (1,341.29 km²) in 2021, while agricultural land contracted sharply from 35 per cent (822.58 km²) to 17 per cent (401.70 km²) over the same period. Built-up area nearly doubled, rising from 5 per cent (121.38 km²) to 9 per cent (217.36 km²), reflecting rapid urban and infrastructural expansion around Jammu city and its peripheral towns, while fallow land declined from 15 per cent to 6 per cent and the river-bed class increased from 4 per cent to 10 per cent, most plausibly on account of hydrological and channel-migration processes along the Tawi and its tributaries. Water bodies remained a marginal but broadly stable 1 per cent of the district throughout. These findings depict a district in transition — from a predominantly agrarian, rural landscape toward one characterised by expanding green cover on the one hand and accelerating urbanisation on the other  and they underscore the urgency of integrated, terrain-sensitive land-use planning that reconciles urban growth with the protection of agricultural and ecological resources. The study offers a replicable, GIS-based framework for monitoring land-use change in sub-Himalayan districts and provides an evidence base for future spatial planning in Jammu district and comparable regions of the north-western Himalayan foothills.