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Evaluation of watersheds and development of a management strategy requires accurate measurement of the past and present land cover/land use parameters as changes observed in these parameters determine the hydrological and ecological processes taking place in a watershed. Present study was thus focused on presenting a comparative case study for detecting the change analysis of two watersheds in Islamabad, namely Rawal and Simly Watershed using satellite data obtained from Landsat 5 and SPOT 5 for the years 1992 and 2012 respectively. Land cover and land use change was detected by applying Supervised classification-maximum likelihood algorithm in ERDAS IMAGINE and five land classes were delineated viz., Agriculture, Bare soil/Rocks, Settlements, Vegetation and Water. Furthermore, land cover/land use and overlay maps for both Watersheds were created in ArcGIS. Achieved overall classification accuracies were 95.32% and 95.13%, while Kappa statistics were 0.9237 and 0.9070 for the final land cover/use maps of 1992 and 2012 respectively.
About the author
Amna Butt has completed her M.Phil in Environmental Sciences with distinction and is currently working as Research Associate. She endeavors to pursue her research in the respective field with dedication, devotion and honesty and to seek opportunities to utilize and enhance her knowledge. She is author of several publications in her field.
