Monitoring the Changing Pattern of Land Use in the Rangpur City Corporation Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Rangpur is one of the fastest growing cities of Bangladesh with a dense population. Being the headquarter of a division in Bangladesh, it is experiencing multi-dimensional problems such as over urbanization, traffic congestion, water logging, and solid waste disposal. Rangpur is a sheer example of having poor legislative actions, inefficient management and lack of public awareness, which leads the urbanization to an unplanned and resource consuming development. This study presents an integrated study of land use pattern in Rangpur City, Bangladesh, by using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS). The data sources used in this study were Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and a Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images taken in 1989, 2000 and 2014, respectively. All images were geometrically and radiometrically corrected and the change detection methods were performed. Then, supervised maximum likelihood classification was used as a cross classification to detect change. The study area was classified into six categories on the basis of field study, geographical conditions, and remote sensing data. The remotely detected land use change from 1989 to 2014 shows that Rangpur is gradually changing, as planted trees, open spaces, low land and Permanent water sources have been transformed into built-up areas.