Spatiotemporal Assessment Of Land Use Land Cover Changes And Their Relationship With Land Surface Temperature In District Ghotki,Pakistan

Urban growth areas have a potential impact on land use and land cover(LULC)due to replacing agricultural land with built-up and commercial areas.This intensifies the earth’s surface temperature.Hence,it is crucial to determine the LULC dynamics and their impacts on the land surface temperature(LST).The objectives of the present research study,are to assess the LULC dynamics and their changes and explore the relationship of LST with LULC indices in district Ghotki.This study depends on five images of Landsat series Landsat 5 TM,7 ETM,and 8OLI/TIRS(2000,2005,2010,2015,and 2020),downloaded from the USGS web portal.Supervised classification with the Maximum Likelihood Classification(MLC)process was applied for LULC.To retrieve the LST and to examine the NDVI,NDBI,and NDWI the red,NIR,and thermal bands were used in the Arc GIS 10.8 environment.Linear regression analysis was applied to make a correlation graph of LST with NDVI,NDBI,and NDWI in Origin software.The results revealed that LULC changes seemed rapid changes among the classes.In the previous 20 years Built-up area has increased from 2000-2020 by 13.70%,the Vegetation decreased by-12.79%,Waterbody increased by 8.47%,Barrenland decreased by-2.73%,and Sand which is the largest LULC class decreased by-6.64%.Similarly in the context of temperature,3°C has been increased at the highest and 3°C increased at the lowest temperature over the study area.Moreover,a negative correlation has been noted between LST-NDVI over all the years.The highest negative correlation of LST-NDVI depicted in 2000 was calculated as R~2=0.76,on the other side,the LST-NDWI correlation was detected as negative except for 2000.The highest correlation value was computed as R~2=0.77 in 2020.The correlation between LST-NDBI in all years was determined as positive with the highest R~2=0.87 in 2000.Therefore,it was concluded that the increasing population with unplanned settlements/built-up is carrying the district towards serious ecological problems and climate changes.In order to meet the requirements of modern and future sustainable development,there is an urgent need to properly utilize and manage the land in the district and develop policies to control the urban development in the district.