A Study Of Land Use/Land Cover Changes From 1988 To 1994 In Nilai and Surrounding Areas
Mazlani Muhammad
Malaysian Center for Remote sensing ( Macres)
Letter Box 208,Lot CB 100, 5th Floor City Square Center
Jalan Tun Razak, 50400 kuala Lumpur , Malaysia
Tel: 603-2645640 Fax : 603-2645650
E-mail : sda@macres.gov.my
Abstract
Nilai consists of several new towns and potential areas of development . it also consists of diversity of land cover/land use such as industrial commercial, residential, agriculture and natural vegetation. Since it is in strategic location , the Government decided to develop Nilai and it's surrounding areas to new townships and two major projects - New Government Administrative Center and Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The aim of this project is to determine the changes of land cover/land use using change detection techniques such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, principal component Analysis, Image Ratioing and Image Differencing. Two sets of Landsat TM data acquired on 17 April 1988 and 2 April 1994 were used in this project. Results showed that development occurred at Bandar Baru Nilai and most of the settlement or ' kampongs ' areas were converted to plantations.
Introduction
Remote sensing technology has been used for many years to acquire data such as for land use or land cover application. It provides a useful aid to map and monitor the changing condition of land surfaces . it allows large scope for analysis, classification and interpretation of the image data, whereby it gives a lot of information form a single image. even though remote sensing cannot solve or manage land surfaces problems , but it provides the required information which when integrated with some other data, it will gives a between ability to do the planning and implementation of a certain project.
Forster ( 1983); Martin and Howarth ( 1989) found that images multi-spectral satellite( Landsat MSS , TM, SPOT ) can give information on change detection for example form rural to urban at lower cost with better accuracy than ground surveys an analysis of aerial photographs . this is also supported by Jensen et al. ( 1983) " satellite-based remote sensing is a potentially powerful tool for monitoring of land use or land cove changes with high temporal resolution and at lower cost than using traditional land survey methods " .
Milne ( 1995) said that it is an alteration in the surface components of the landscape. Some of the more common types of changes detectable on remotely sensed data are associated with he clearing of natural vegetation, increased cultivation, urban expansion, the changing surface level in bodies of standing water, vegetation regeneration after wildfires and soil disturbances resulting form mining, landslides and the overgrazing of animals . if there is change in land cover, there is an alteration of spectral reflectance's recorded by the sensors. Sabins ( 1987) stated that change detection images provide information about seasonal or other changes then the information is extracted by comparing two or more images of an area that were acquired at differences times.
Study Area
The study area, Nilai is located 25 km south of Kuala Lumpur ( capital of Malaysia ) and 20 km north of seremban (state capital of Negeri Sembilan ). Erinco ( 1992) found that Nilai contains the diversity of land use- industrial and commercial, residential which includes settlement or ' kampungs ' , agriculture ( rubber and palm oil ) as well as natural vegetation. The original images of 1988 and 1994 area as Plate 1 and Plate 2 respectively. The cover types were characterized based on their spectral response ( the categories are presumed and may not represent exact land use or cover types in the area because no field work or surface sampling and topographic map is available ). Industrial, commercial and settlement or ' kampungs' - cyan ( due to the reflectance of blue and green from the concrete, cement, asphalt etc.); developing residential-brown ( due to the reflectance of NIR and visible red of sparsely vegetated areas ); agriculture-red ( due to the NIR reflectance ); natural vegetation - bright red (due to the NIR reflectance ) ; natural vegetation - bright red( due to the dominance of NIR ); estate with plantation - pink red ( due to red reflectance (NIR) is more than blue and green ).
Plate 1: Nilai and surrounding areas in 1988
R G B = 4 3 2
Plate 2: Nilai and surrounding areas in 1994
R G B = 4 3 2
Aim and Objective
The aim of this project is to use high resolution remotely sensed data, Landsat TM, to identify the changes of land use/land cover of Nilai and surrounding areas over time. This will be examined by comparing the data acquired at two different dates: 17 April 1988 and 2 April 1994. from this analysis , the land cover/land use change classification map will be produced. Since the images were acquired on almost the same date , there will be no difference due to solar elevation , solar irradiance and solar zenith angle ( Forster, 1995).
