Monitoring & Evaluating of Urban Expansion and Its Impact on Land use Land Cover Change of Sargodha, Pakistan (2000-2025)

Abstract

Urban growth is a significant land-use transition that is taking place in many rapidly growing cities, especially where the expansion is taking place on productive agricultural land. The purpose of this research was to explore the Spatio-temporal pattern of urban expansion and changes in land use/land cover (LULC) in Sargodha Tehsil, Pakistan, for the period 2000-2025. This study used the remote sensing and GIS techniques to analyze the satellite imageries of 6 years. These years include 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 and 2025. The study area covered an expanse of 1536 km² and comprised four land use/land cover (LULC) classes, including agricultural land, built-up area, barren land, and water bodies. The study used supervised classification Maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) to identify the dominant land use and land cover types and determine the percentage of the region that was covered by each class. The results show that there is a growing trend in the built-up area throughout the years. It increased from 115 km² in 2000 to 180 km² in 2005, 233 km² in 2010, 297 km² in 2015, 361 km² in 2020, and 440 km² in 2025. Thus, it can be stated that there was an increase in the built-up area by 325 km² or 282.6% over the studied period. In contrast, the amount of farmland decreased from 1,014 km² to 815 km² or 199 km². The area of barren land decreased as well from 280 km² to 153 km². At the same time, there was no significant change in the amount of water bodies from 127 km² to 128 km². Findings reveal a significant change from a primarily agricultural region to a region with a considerable presence of developed areas and emphasize the increasing pressure on productive land. The research underlines the significance of planned urbanization, protection of productive agricultural lands, regular geospatial monitoring, and appropriate management of the periphery belt.