Evaluating Environmental Land Use/Land Cover Change Detection in Sub Urban Fringe Area Around Madurai City Using GIS Technique

Urban growth is most rapid in the developing world, where cities gain an average of five million residents every month in a year. The rapid urbanization and other infrastructure development in cities made workers to substitute a greater distance between their residencies and the cities so it encroached industries and businesses to locate or relocate in suburban fringe areas which contain all facilities such as in metropolitan areas. The urban service area-Madurai, a metropolitan area, is currently experiencing linear to horizontal expansion and a variety of development pressures due to the unabated scattered population growth and socio-economic status, which portrays the conversion of agriculture lands, wet lands and number of water bodies into housing and industrial sites in a haphazard manner at the outskirts of the city known as Madurai suburban fringe area. This study evaluates the effectiveness of high-resolution satellite data and computer aided GIS techniques in assessing the land use change dynamics within the study area, Madurai city and its suburban fringe areas, from 2001 to 2008. Satellite images were used for the year 2001 and 2008 at scale 1:50000.