Abstract:

Mining and human activities impacted the natural ecosystem leading to land use/land cover (LU/LC) change is of great concern by environmentalist and the society. The present study evaluated the LU/LC changes due to exploitation of coal in Dhanbad district of India during the period of 1987 to 2017. Remote sensing (RS) data indicated that out of 2043.32 ha LU/LC comprised of dense forest, low dense forest, open scrub, agriculture land, agriculture fallow, barren land, sand, river, water body, built-up and mining, constituted percent values of 8.17, 3.11, 39.51, 18.88, 12.69, 1.25, 0.76, 3.12, 2.88, 4.40 and 5.22 in 1987 and 4.69, 6.01, 15.78, 41.36, 9.97, 3.90, 2.55, 2.22, 1.43, 7.91, 4.18 in 2017 respectively. The LU/LC during 30 years indicated the percent share of dense forest, open scrub, agricultural fallow, river, water body and mining decreased by 42.63, 60.45, 21.47, 28.80, 50.37 and 19.85 % respectively. Land use changes were due to harvesting of forest for fuel, shelter and agriculture, construction of residential houses in fallow land, urbanization and sand removal for construction material. The increase in low dense forest, agricultural land, barren land, sand and built-up area by 93.38, 119.06, 211.63, 234.96 and 79.85 percent respectively were due to shift of land use from forest to open scrub, agricultural fields and barren lands, new settlement by utilizing sands from river banks making the river stretch wider, open mine pits converted into water bodies in the district. These resulted in a considerable change in land use pattern in Dhanbad district, Jharkhand, India.

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