15 Page 8 of 11 Environ Monit Assess (2020) 192: 15

Table 4 Peri-urban land-use/cover change matrix in percentage (1988–1997)

Land-use/Land-cover classes 1997

Land use classes Agriculture/ Barren/ Other Water bodies/
Built-up
Fallow land Semi-barren lands Vegetation Wetlands
Land-use/Land-cover

Agriculture/
Fallow land 37.6 14.7 24.8 3.2 12.2 7.6
classes 1988

Barren/
Semi-barren 21.5 30.9 29.5 2.4 11.1 4.7
Built-up 24.4 11.6 49.5 3.7 6.1 4.8
Other lands 23.9 11.6 17.4 14.7 5.6 26.8
Vegetation 30.3 12.1 16.8 2.2 34.6 4.1
Water bodies/
Wetlands 13.6 1.6 3.2 4.2 5.2 72.1

prove that the built-up area has spread out in all directions
within the CMA. Table 3 and Fig. 4 depict the results of
the analysis which shows that the agricultural land has
decreased from 42.2 to 19.5 percentage and forest land
area has decreased from 14.9 to 6.1 percentage in the
peri-urban region.
decades, which in turn, has greatly affected agriculture,
vegetation, and water bodies, the percentage of change
in the peri-urban areas being 23.52, 9.10, and 2.45,
respectively, as shown in Table 3.
Reasons for changes in LULC

Land-use/cover change detection
Changes in the land-use/cover classes over the years
have been detected. Comparative analysis technique
was used to create LULC for terms 1 and 2 individually.
The matrix Tables 4, 5, and 6 show the peri-urban land-
use/land-cover changes over the years in percentage.
The highlighted values along the diagonal of the three
matrix tables indicate the percentage of unchanged areas
in each LULC types over the years. It was found that
most of the land has been urbanizing over the last three
Chennai is situated along the coast which forces the city
to grow only radially along the western direction. The
city being the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, people
moved towards the same for better higher education and
job opportunities. The city is well connected to other parts
of the state by roads. Chennai being located at the north-
ern part of the state is connected to the southern region by
the Great Southern Trunk (GST) road, OMR, and ECR. It
is connected to Mumbai through the Bangalore highway
along the western corridor and to Kolkata (another met-
ropolitan city) through the Great Northern Trunk (GNT)

Table 5 Peri-urban land-use/cover change matrix in percentage (1997–2006)

Land-use/Land-cover classes 2006

Land use classes Agriculture/ Barren/ Other Water bodies/
Built-up Vegetation
Fallow land Semi-barren lands Wetlands
Land-use/Land-cover

Agriculture/
42.3 12.8 31.0 4.7 6.5 2.7
Fallow land
classes 1997

Barren/
22.4 39.4 29.3 2.4 4.7 1.7
Semi-barren
Built-up 20.4 15.9 54.3 3.6 4.1 1.7

Other lands 22.5 8.7 30.1 22.7 3.5 12.5

Vegetation 35.1 11.8 17.8 2.9 30.6 1.9

Water bodies/
13.6 3.3 5.6 6.5 3.9 66.9
Wetlands
Environ Monit Assess (2020) 192: 15 Page 9 of 11 15

Table 6 Peri-urban land-use/cover change matrix in percentage (2006–2017)

Land-use/Land-cover classes 2017

Land use classes Agriculture/ Barren/ Other Water bodies/
Built-up
Fallow land Semi-barren lands Vegetation Wetlands
Land-use/Land-cover

Agriculture/
Fallow land 26.5 21.0 40.3 2.6 7.0 2.5
classes 2006

Barren/
Semi-barren 17.0 26.2 49.9 2.9 2.9 1.0
Built-up 15.0 15.5 61.7 3.7 3.1 0.9
Other lands 32.6 13.1 32.0 11.5 7.5 3.2
Vegetation 29.2 12.4 26.9 2.6 25.9 2.9
Water bodies/
Wetlands 27.4 15.9 8.8 6.0 4.8 37.0

road. From Fig. 1, it is clear that people who came in
search of better opportunities in the city have settled
along the well-connected roads which gave them access
to the city. The exact reason for LULC change can be
attributed to industrial development and increased eco-
nomic activity along these radial roads, thereby attracting
huge population. The increase in built-up area along the
road corridors connecting various parts of the city in the
radial direction helps understanding this phenomenon.
The development of the city of Chennai was mainly
along these corridors after the year of 2000. The estab-
lishment of Sriperumbudur industrial estate along the
western outskirts of the city and the development of Sri
Ramanujar Information Technology (IT) Park and Tidel
Park in the old Mahabalipuram road along the southern
sides accelerated the development in the Peri-urban areas.
Accuracy assessment and validation
Random sampling method was applied to qualitatively
estimate the accuracy of land-cover change. Global Posi-
tioning System (GPS) and Google earth data were used
for locating the sample collection points. A minimum of
50 samples were collected for each land-use category to
carry out the error matrix analysis (Campbell et al. 2015;
Congalton 1991). For this purpose, around 650 points
were randomly selected for each land-use (200 points
for Agriculture/Fallow, 50 points for Barren/Semi-barren,
150 points for Built-up lands, 125 points for Vegetation,
100 for water bodies, and 25 points for other land-use) and
the same sampling points were used for each land-use/
cover. The classification accuracy was assessed through
the confusion matrix. Results show an overall accuracy of
0.91 (91%) and kappa coefficient was 0.84 (84%).
Conclusion
Ensemble of spectral indices proves to be effective in
the classification of land-use/land-cover such as built-up
land, barren and semi-barren land, vegetation, and sur-
face water bodies (Table 7). The extraction of various
classes becomes more critical in urban areas due to the
random distribution of pixels and low spatial resolution

Table 7 Description of spectral indices with authors’ reference

Acronym Abbreviation of the indices Description Authors/reference

NDVI Normalized Difference Vegetation Quantifies vegetation by measuring the difference between near (Rouse et al. 1973)
Index infrared and red bands monitor vegetation statuses
MNDWI Modified Normalized Difference Water Green and middle infrared band used to obtain a MNDWI. (Xu 2006)
Index It is primarily utilized for removal of built-up land noise
NDBI Normalized Difference Built-up Index Extract urban built-up lands combine with short wave infrared (Zha et al. 2003)
and red bands evaluation built-up statuses
NDBaI Normalized Difference Barren Index Proposed to extract bare areas automatically, and then the bare Zhao and Chen
lands could be subdivided into primary bare land, secondary 2005)
bare land
15 Page 10 of 11
of satellite imageries. To overcome this drawback, Bool-
ean operation was used for the accurate extraction of
these LULC features. The results show that the decadal
rate of change in urban sprawl during the interval 1988–
1997, 1997–2006, and 2006–2017 are 13.7%, 6.4%,
and 10.7%, respectively. This increase in the urban
built-up (Fig. 4d) land has led to the reduction in
agriculture/fallow land, vegetation, and water bodies.
This study is particularly useful in understanding the
micro scale phenomena causing this change and in the
decision-making process to counteract the change. Cre-
ating a natural resource inventory of water bodies, for-
ests and ecologically sensitive zones will help the urban
planners to provide inputs to government departments to
curtail the probable negative effects of urbanization.
CMDA has to create an online inventory of natural
resources information system (comprising of water bod-
ies, forests, and ecologically sensitive zones) available
in public domain. A buffer zone has to be included to
restrict the construction in those areas based on the
sensitivity consideration. This information system will
provide inputs to government department to maintain
and curtail the probable negative effects of urbanization
thereby helping the City to expand in a sustainable way.
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