Journal of Geographic Information System, 2014, 6, 653-663 Published Online December 2014 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/jgis http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jgis.2014.66054 How to cite this paper: Al Jaber, S., Ghosh, A.K. and Mahmud, M.S. (2014) Using Time Series of Satellite Images to Detect Vegetation Cover Change in Dhaka City. Journal of Geographic Information System, 6, 653-663. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jgis.2014.66054 Using Time Series of Satellite Images to Detect Vegetation Cover Change in Dhaka City Sami Al Jaber, Amit Kumar Ghosh, Mallik Sezan Mahmud Department of Geography and Environment, Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh Email: riads45@yahoo.com Received 24 September 2014; revised 24 October 2014; accepted 20 November 2014 Copyright © 2014 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract The spatial land cover pattern of Dhaka city is restlessly altering as it has highest growing rates among megacities. Due to high urbanization rates, land use is changing from natural to man-made along with resource extractions that accelerate the land cover changes. This study has evidently given the glimpse of the raising concern by assessing the loss of vegetation coverage of Dhaka Metropolitan Area using multi-temporal Landsat imageries. 20 years satellite data have been used to detect the vegetation cover changes in Dhaka city with an interval of 10 years. Study reveals that 66.87 square kilometer vegetation coverage of Dhaka Metropolitan Area is lost during the whole time period. The rate of loss of vegetation coverage is very severe in Dhanmondi, Gulshan, Uttara, Demra, Mirpur, Sabujbagh, Ramna, Mohammadpur, Kafrul, Shyampur and so on. The over- all precision of my Landsat-derived vegetation coverage maps is 92.5%. Keywords Dhaka Metropolitan Area, Vegetation Coverage, Landsat Imageries 1. Introduction Vegetation is an important part of the global carbon cycle because trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis [1]. By removing this greenhouse gas from the air, vegetation functions as terrestrial sinks meaning they store large amounts of carbon [2]. At any time, vegetation coverage accounts for as much as double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere [3]. Even as more anthropogenic carbon is produced, forests re- move around three billion tons of anthropogenic carbon every year [4]. This amounts to about 30% of all carbon