A monitoring framework for land use around kaolin mining areas through Landsat TM images

Sustainable management of land requires regular acquisition of qualitative information regarding the status of its use. It is especially important to track the changes relating to the land’s competitive development needs such as mining. The field-based monitoring of a mine with a wide footprint is expensive and time-consuming. Remote sensing techniques have been developed and demonstrated as cost-effective alternatives for the conventional methods of land use/land cover (LULC) monitoring. In this study, the land cover changes that occurred between the year of 2000 and 2009 in a kaolin mining and processing area in the Kutch region of India are mapped using two Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) images. For this purpose, the spectral signature of the land covers including vegetation cover and kaolin were determined and matched filtering (MF) method was applied to classify the images. The overall accuracy of the classified 2009 image was estimated for the kaolin and the vegetation cover to 89.5 and 86.0 % respectively. The change in the land use which occurred from 2000 to 2009 were quantified and analysed for both classes. This study provided a practical framework for rapid mapping of the land cover changes around open-cut kaolin mining area using freely available Landsat data.