Change Detection of Vegetative Covers in Kalara Nala Watershed of Damoh District Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Remote sensing and GIS technologies have proven to be effective tools to analyse land use land cover (LULC) changes on watershed basis. The evaluation and monitoring of watershed development programmes are of prime importance to assess the conservation of natural resources and the efficiency of their utilization. The investigation aims to detect changes in vegetative cover due to water harvesting and recharging structures of the study watershed situated in Patharia block of Damoh district, Madhya Pradesh. The watershed development programme was executed during the period 2018-2022. All the processes related to the evaluation of watershed development activities were performed using remote sensing and GIS tools through pre and post development data in the GIS environment. The change detection in vegetative cover was done based on land use land cover patterns. By adopting unsupervised classification approach, high-resolution satellite data of Sentinel-2B for the years 2018 and 2022 were used for land use land cover (LULC) mapping and further analysis. During the year 2018, it was observed that the vegetative cover in the watershed was 37% of the watershed area however after the implementation of the watershed development programme total vegetative cover increased to 60% of the total watershed area in the year 2022. From the study, it can be concluded that remote sensing and GIS can prove to be viable tool for the evaluation of watershed development programmes.