Modelling the land use system process for a pre-industrial landscape in India

Abstract

Land in India is changing in a rapid pace since the green revolution during 1960 and industrial policy reforms during 1990. Certainly land cover land use (LCLU) changes have huge impacts on countries overall ecological balance and climate change. The most intriguing fact is LCLU change is an interconnected phenomenon like a system. The understanding of local level LCLU dynamics are yet to get a momentum in India. The present study is an attempt: (1) to examine the land use change drivers active at the studied landscape of coastal Karnataka in India and (2) to model the LCLU changes in pre-industrialized period using Dyna-CLUE model. Binary logistic regression was used to categorize land change drivers and to estimate the probability of changes. Odd ratio from logistic regression indicates that the biophysical drivers are most prominent in determining location of LCLU. They being slope, relative relief, drainage density and availability of ground water are the most influential drivers for most of the land classes. The Dyna-CLUE model is successful to simulate the LCLU change at aggregate level but the spatial allocation needs improvement. © 2017, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.