A study of land cover changes in Kerteh catchment area using satellite imagery

Abstract

The Kerteh catchment area located at the South of Kuala Terengganu with total area approximately 27,500 hectares. A period of ten years has caused big differences in the land cover composition due the data of land cover plays a pivotal role in environmental change, e.g. river flow and sediment load around the area. This study is to create land cover map of year 2000 and year 2010 by using remotely sensing data and to detect the qualitative and quantitative changes rate of land cover in this ten year interval. The ground truth data were collected for run the classification process of Landsat 7 satellite imagery year 2000 and SPOT 5 satellite imagery year 2010 to get the land cover map of year 2000 and year 2010. The classification maps were then overlay by using union method and follow by analysis result by using query to get qualitative and quantitative result. The land cover changes have been successfully detected. Grassland has a lowest loss of land cover, which was only 15.113 hectare with 100% change rate. Rural area has a highest loss of land cover, which was 6049.707 hectare with 91.95% change rate. Mangrove has a lowest add of land cover, which was only 0.62hectare with 0.08% change rate.