Abstract:
The main aim of the study is to detect the changes of land use land cover (LULC) in Kuliyapitiya West Divisional Secretariat division during 2008-2022. Following the download of Landsat images in the study area, several procedures were taken to pre-process the images. This included performing radiometric and geometric corrections to eliminate undesired sensor data and atmospheric noise. The Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC) was used as the main technique of image post-processing to derive land use maps for the target years. To evaluate the accuracy of outputs 525 ground control points were verified using the Google Earth Pro engine. The classification accuracy of the study was 86% for 2008, 79 % in 2015, and 80 % in 2022. The results showed that over the past 15 years, settlements and built-up areas increased from 20.84% to 28.14% and 0.33% to 2.71%, respectively, whereas coconut lands decreased from 58.3% to 48.6%. The settlement, which showed an increase of land area of 11.9 km2 throughout the period, was identified as the main land use gainer while coconut was the main land use that lost 15.9 km2 of its land area over the past fifteen years. The built-up area showed a 3.96 km2 overall gain during the period due to urbanization and the expansion of the industrial, educational, and service sectors in the study area. The other four land use classes have not undergone any significant changes throughout the relevant time. The study highlights the importance of combining accuracy evaluation and image classification algorithms to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the LULC changes. Hence, our findings could assist decision-makers in land use planning to efficiently guide the sustainable land management.
