Utilizing Data Science Tools in Landscape Analysis to Quantify Urbanization Effects on Pallikaranai Wetland, Southern India through Geospatial Techniques

Urbanization refers to the population shift from rural to metropolitan zones and is often mentioned as the slow rise in the population in urban locations. Therefore, it is important to cover, quantify, and comprehend this expansion process for efficient planning and sustainable resource management. The Pallikaranai marsh, one among the few of marshland regions of southern India, with an extended region of 5000 hectares has reduced to only a tenth of that size because of excessive human interference activities. However, extensive restoration activities have been taken in recent times to maintain the integral characteristics of this wetland region. Temporal remote sensing-based analysis will help in the restoration process in a consistent way. This study aims to employ data science tools to quantitatively assess and index changes in land use concerning landscape, environmental conditions, water levels, economic factors, pollution, and vegetation cover within Pallikaranai, utilizing geospatial techniques. The land use/land cover maps were prepared for various periods in time, which were derived from satellite images of Landsat series namely of TM (Thematic Mapper), MSS (Multi Spectral Scanner), ETM (Enhanced Thematic Mapper) thereby covering various time periods (1973, 1980, 1991, 2000, 2010 and 2018). These datasets were in conjunction with other aspatial datasets, to quantify different categories of land cover changes. The Normalized Differential Vegetation Index, Normalized Differential Water Index and Shanon’s Entropy metrics are employed to estimate the changes in vegetation, water and population characteristics in the Pallikarani region. From the results, it could be inferred that an increased variation of about 93.37% of increase land area causing urbanization. Further there is a 50% reduction in open and deep water area of the Pallikaranai wetland.