Satellite

Biography

Biography: V K Srivastava

Abstract

The changes in land use/cover, coupled with human dimensions, climate change and variability, affect the natural resources and ecosystem in a complex way. These changes have important implications for future changes in the earth’s climate and for subsequent land-use change. Many forces affect the human activity including local culture, economics, environmental conditions, land policy and development program which drive the land use/cover change. Models which are abstraction of complex interaction between various drivers can be used to describe the spatial and temporal relationships between drivers and the resulting patterns of land use and their changes. Models are also used to predict future configurations of land use patterns under various scenarios of bio-physical and socio-economic change. Though many LULCC models are available in literature, but all are case and region specific. No model can be adopted for a different place other than the place for which it was developed. In India where population density is high along with high cultural, social, climatic and physiographic diversity, none of the exiting LULCC model performs to the satisfaction. Therefore, an agent based statistical model was developed to meet the requirement in Indian River basins. The spatial and temporal integrity in view of significant available drivers have been maintained using statistical tools. The model predicts the future land use/land cover scenarios with respect to the past changes in the two time frames. This model though was developed and evaluated for Goa, India and used in all the river basins of the country.