Assessment of Land Use/Land Cover Change Impact on the Hydrology of Asan River Watershed of Dehradun District, Uttarakhand

Abstract

Land use/Land cover (LULC) change results from the alteration of the earth’s surface by human beings and have potentially large impacts on water resources. Some regions of India are facing serious problems of water resources scarcity, especially the regions where the rapid urbanization/industrialization takes place in past few years for example; Asan River Watershed of Dehradun district, India. By using land use supervised classification technique with Maximum Likelihood method, LULC maps were prepared for the year 2000 and 2013. The overall Kappa statistics of classified image is found to be 0.87 & 0.86, respectively, which is fairly acceptable. To evaluate the effect of LULC change on runoff of the study area, hydrological modeling is done by using Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model considering the LULC change in 13 years. It was observed that the build-up area has increased dramatically by 88.65% in the watershed (major changes in sub basin no. 20 & 16), the crop land and forest is decreased by 6.61% and 0.25%, respectively. Hydrological modeling results for those sub basins state that there was an average increase of 70% and 65% surface runoff during 13 years due to the rapid growth of industries in the areas.