REMOTE SENSING STUDIES OF CHANGES IN SOME ENVIRONMENTAL PARAMETERS IN WEST BIHAR REGION ALONG RIVER SON

Abstract

The exploitation of natural resources by the growing population for better living conditions has not only threatened the existence of these resources, but also caused irreparable damage to our environment. The ever increasing population, growing industrialisation etc. without proper planning has created environmental pollution cansing serious health concerns for the entire human population. In recent days, the problems of the environment have been well realised. In order to have a comprehens-ive management of the environment, there is a need to study it periodically and suggest timely remedial steps for its preservation. For environmental management, reliable and accu-rate information pertaining to land in short time is required. The conventional techniques for this are extremely time consumine and costly. The-technique of remote sensing offers tremendous potential for this purpose on a real time basis reducing the cost of data acquisition. In this dissertation, an attempt has been made to study some of the environmental parameters using remote sensing technique. An area of about 7562 Sq.Kms. in West Bihar region albng river Son has been taken for the study. This area has been selected since it manifests typical problems of waterlogging and salinity. Also pro-blems of channel migration do occur in this area. In this study the capabilities of Landsat M.S.S.data pro- ducts have been demonstrated for inventory and mapping of water- logged areasylso these data products showed their pot- ential for study of river morphology and channel migrat- ion problems. Further, the study has emphasised the capabilities of digital image processing systems. Digital enhancement techniques have been used to obtain superior quality of F.C.C. in comparison with conventional ones. Digital classifi:cation methods provide reasonable accuracy with adequate training sets when separability between classes do exist. Inspite of this visual analysis provides better results in intermixing conditions. It is observed that hybrid. approach is the best one. Further, digital enhance-ment techniques provide special types of data products (like enhanced imagery for water features). In the present study, by visual interpretation methods, it has been found that water bodies have incr-eased by 1.66%, barren land has reduced by 2.38% and waterlogged areas have increased by 1.16% within a span of 11 years in the study area.