Quantifying the Dynamics and Drivers of Landscape Change in an Opencast Coal Mining Area of Central India (East Bokaro, Jharkhand)

This paper evaluates the spatiotemporal dynamics of landscape change and identifies the primary drivers of deforestation in East Bokaro coalfields from 1972 to 2016 using grid-based change detection and spatial statistics. Landsat images for the years 1972, 2001 and 2016 were classified using a supervised maximum likelihood technique to generate the land use and land cover maps for each year. Square grids of 500 m were used to quantify the cumulative changes in land cover from 1972 to 2016. Grid-based correlation and regression analyses were used to identify the drivers of change. The results revealed that the area has undergone major changes in land cover pattern in the last 44 years due to expansion of mining activities. Forests and agriculture have reduced while settlement and barren lands have increased considerably. Extensive plantation activities on mining wastelands in the last few decades have led to an increase in the forest cover by about 8.22%. Correlations indicated that both mining and agriculture increased at the expense of forests to some degree and agricultural lands were sacrificed for the expansion of built-up areas. Regression analysis confirmed that agriculture and mining were the most influential factors driving the changes in forest cover.