Department of Civil Engineering, GM Institute of Technology, Davangere

The present study deals with the land use / land cover mapping and change detection studies in and around the Deverabelekere Reservoir. The Studies Involves identifying the current land use pattern and changes occurred over a period due to the urbanization by adopting satellite remote sensing technologies and GIS tools. IRS-1D, LISS-III geocoded data of 2000 and IRS-P6, LISS-IV geocoded data of 2008 Satellite data and Toposheets from Survey of India (SOI) are acquired as primary and secondary data for analysis. Interpretation techniques are used to identify the land use/ land cover information by applying both pre- interpretation, ground truth and post visual interpretation of the satellite image layers like land use/ land cover such as agriculture, waste land, water bodies, forest etc. are prepared. The interpreted maps topology is created by linking the spatial data file and attribute data file. The overlay analysis was carried out to find out the changes in the land use pattern over eight years period. The images of the study area were categorized into five different classes namely vegetation, agriculture, barren, built-up and water body. The results indicate that during the last two decades built-up and land have been increased by 2.15% (10.72km²) and water bodies 0.95% (4.795km²). While agriculture, barren land and Forest have decreased by 5.62% (28.2 km²), 0.70% (17.228 km²) and forest area have unchanged respectively. The paper highlights the importance of digital change detection techniques for nature and location of change in and around the” Deverabelekere Reservoir.