Assessing Urban Expansion and Land Cover Change in City District Lahore using Multi-Stage Satellite Data

Lahore, a metropolis and 2nd second-largest city of Pakistan, has been experiencing rapid urban expansion over the past five decades. The socio-economic development and growth of the urban population have caused the rapid increase of urban expansion. The increase in the built-up area of Lahore has seen remarkable growth during the past decades. This study is aimed at detecting the Spatio-temporal changes in land use and land cover and evaluating the urban expansion of Lahore since 2003. The conversion of land to other uses is primarily because of growth in urban population, whereas the increase in economic activities is the central reason for the land-use changes. In this study, temporal Landsat imageries were used. The supervised image classification of the maximum likelihood algorithm was applied on Landsat ETM+ (2003) and OLI/TIRs (2023) images, whereas a post-classification comparison technique was employed to detect changes over time. The spatial and temporal analysis revealed that during the past twenty decades, the built-up area of Lahore city has expanded by 486 km². It was found from the analysis that in Lahore city, the urban expansion was primarily at the cost of loss of fertile agricultural land, vegetation, and other cultivable land use. The analysis further revealed that The Total agricultural area in 2003 was 725 KM². The agricultural land to Built-up area is about 325 km². Due to the population increasing, the newly added population needs more space to fulfill their basic needs. The Total Barren Land in 2003 was 7452 KM².The Barren land to Built-up color, which is about 255 km².Rapid Land use changes have been marked for a period of 20 years in Lahore. The increase in the area used for built-up land is 470 Km² in 2003 to 956 Km² in 2023 (overall increase is 28 %), respectively