Investigating land use and land cover changes in Dublin, Ireland using Satellite Imagery: A comparative analysis

Over the past few decades, there has been over increasing pressure on land due to population growth, urbanization, agriculture expansion and industrialization. The change in land use and land cover (LULC) pattern are highly dependent on human intervention. Deforestation pattern has started due to growth of suburbs, cities, and industrial land. The alarming rate in change of LULC pattern was on a rising trend since 1990s and has been increasing over time. This study focuses on analyzing the changes in LULC pattern in Dublin, Ireland over the past two decades using remotely sensed LANDSAT satellite imagery data, and quantify the effect of LULC change in streamflow simulation in watershed at Dublin by using rainfall-runoff model. Benefit of using remotely sensed image to investigate LULC changes include availability of high-resolution spatial data at free of cost, images captured at high temporal resolution to monitor the changes in LULC during both seasonal and yearly timescale and readily availability of data. The potential classification of landforms has been done by performing both supervised as well as unsupervised classification. The results obtained from the classified images have been compared to google earth images to understand the accuracy of the image classification. The change in LULC can be characterized by changes in building density and urban/artificial area (build up areas increase due to population growth), changes in vegetation area as well as vegetation health, changes in waterbodies and barren land. Furthermore, a set of indices such as vegetation index, building index, water index and drought index were estimated, and their changes were monitored over time. Results of this analysis can be used to understand the driving factors affecting the changes in LULC and to develop mathematical models to predict future changes in landforms. Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) based rainfall-runoff model were used to simulate the changes in runoff due to the LULC changes in watershed over two decades. The developed framework is highly replicable because of the used LANDSAT data and can be applied to generate essential information for conservation and management of green/forest lands, as well as changes in water availability and water stress in the assessed area.