International Journal for Innovation Education and Research www.ijier.net Vol.2-07, 2014 International Educative Research Foundation and Publisher © 2014 pg. 96 Assessing landscape changes of catchment area of Upper Lake Bhopal using patch analysis Ajit Kumar Jain 1 S. K. Katiyar 2 M. S. Chauhan 3 Research Scholar Professor Professor Department of Civil Engineering, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology Bhopal, (M.P.) INDIA. Email : 1. erajitjain@gmail.com 2. skatiyar7@rediffmail.com 3. mschauhan@manit.ac.in Abstract Anthropogenic activities impart serious challenges on wetland management. The issues of Anthropogenic Activities manifest in the form of environmental degradation, point and non-point source pollution of lake water. Catchment area of upper lake Bhopal has been witnessing the same scenario; raising the question of its planning and management to control water pollution. It shows the necessity to analyse and study the pattern of land use & land cover(LULC). In order to assess the LULC pattern and spatio-temporal dynamics the changing pattern of patch number(NP), class area(CA), mean patch size(MPS), mean shape index (MSI), Shannon’s Diversity index(SHDI), Simpson’s Diversity Index(SDI) of all land use/land cover categories. In this research paper above mentioned parameters were measured and analyzed for landuse/landcover change from year 2003 to 2011. Area of agriculture and built up land expanded 16.18% and 4.77% while number of patches reduced by 332 and 187 for these two classes respectively. On the other hand class area of vegetation and barren land reduced 9.33% and 11.62%. Few patches of vegetation completely eliminated resulted in reduction of number of patches by 1250. Increased no. of patches of barren land by 150 shows fragmentation. Reduction in diversity indices indicates that area becomes less diversified during study period. During the period of 2003 to 2011 shape of patches of agriculture and built up land becomes more complex and that of barren land and vegetation converted to simpler shape. These indices provided meaningful insights pertaining to the spatio- temporal dynamics prevailing in the catchment area of Upper Lake Bhopal. Keywords: Catchment,Landscape Indices,Patch parameters, spatio-temporal dynamics, Landscape dynamics. Introduction Economic development results in challenges of management and growth of landscape. Understanding the changing pattern of landscape is important for landscape planning and nature conservation. Quantification of changes in landscape pattern is the first step to understand the principles of ecology. Change in LULC of landscape can be expressed by words, maps or indices. This quantification by means of indices is recently developed method which has been used by different researchers to understand the landscape dynamics. This method gives opportunity to compare landscape patterns and to treat the data statistically. Remote sensing data and GIS help in analyzing the pattern, growth and extent of urban sprawl pattern (Sudhira et al 2004). They also stated that pattern of sprawl could also be identified by modeling the extent of sprawl and subsequently nature of future sprawl can be predicted. Some landscape metrics required for quantifying sprawl was also described by him. Turner and Ruscher (1998) have used the size and number of patches, fractal dimension of patches, and diversity indices to quantify land use pattern in Georgia, USA. They found that