A Study On Land Use Changes In Southern Part Of Visakhapatnam City Due To Urbanization-A Case Study

Abstract

With the increasing population the need of employment for few people and desire of few
others to live in urban areas is increasing day by day. With this drastic increase in urbanization
the use of land for various purposes is also changing since the last few years. Few parameters
like vegetation cover, quantity of surface water body, forest area, the remaining barren land are
major things affected by Urbanization. In this paper a study is made on changes occurred in these
parameters in the southern part of Visakhapatnam city covering an area of 54.41sq.km using RS
& GIS software by analyzing the satellite images of the years2005, 2010 and 2015. Vegetative
cover & Forest cover are found to be varying hugely from 2005 to 2015 due to rapid
Urbanization in the city. The study is also focused on to estimation of the runoff depth by using
the runoff coefficient method. The runoff depths are estimated for top three highest peak rainfall
depths of the rain fall years from 1997 to 2019.It is found that the Surface run off in 2030 will
be increased to 25 % of the discharge in 2015 indirectly affecting the ground water recharge.