Current World Environment Vol. 12(1), 157-164 (2017) An Integrated Approach of Remote Sensing and Gis for Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection: A Case Study of Banjar River Watershed Of Madhya Pradesh, India JAGRITI TIWARI 1 S.K. SHARMA 1 and R.J.PATIL 2 1 Department of Soil & Water Engineering, College of Agricultural Engineering,J.N.K.V.V, Jabalpur (M.P.) 2 Schofileld Centre, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, (U.K.). http://dx.doi.org/10.12944/CWE.12.1.18 (Received: February 16, 2017; Accepted: April 12, 2017) ABSTRACT Land use and land cover of a region is one of the prime concerns in current strategies for the evaluationof the watersheds and development of decision making policies. An uncertain increase in the population of the country along with the increasing demands has imposed an immense pressure on the land threatening the sustainability of the natural resources especially in the developing countries like India. The study was carried out to detect the land use and land cover changes observed in the Banjar River watershed lies in between Balaghat and Mandla districts of Madhya Pradesh, India using the multi spectral satellite dataset for two different years i.e. 2009 & 2013. The supervised classification was done in ERDAS IMAGINE software. The images of the study area was classified into seven classes namely, river, water body, waste land, habitation, forest, agriculture/other vegetation, open land/fallow land/barren land. The result indicates that during the last five years, forest, water body, waste land and open land/fallow land/barren has been increased by 2.26%, 0.55%, 0.23% and 0.48% respectively and the river, habitation and agriculture/other vegetation has been decreased by 0.26%, 0.04%, and 3.22% respectively. Accuracy assessment was also performed in this study to determine the quality of land use/cover map and overall accuracy was found 89.70% for 2009 and 91.91% for 2013.Present study emphasizes on digital change detection techniques for recognizing temporal changes in land use/land cover of the watershed. Outcomes of this study indicate need of implementing conservation and management practices for the socioeconomic development. Keyword: Remote sensing, GIS, Land use/land cover, Watershed. INTRODUCTION Management of natural resources and monitoring of environmental changes is one of the major factors essential for the formulation and implementation of proper land use plans for the development of any country. Land use and Land cover (LULC) change detection is an effective strategy which can be adopted for proper land use planning to determine the interactive effects of heterogeneity and disturbances occurring on the earth surface. Land cover can be defined as the observed (bio) physical cover on earth’s land as vegetation, open water or manmade features. While land use refers to the total of arrangements, activities and inputs that people undertake in certain land cover type 1,2 . Human activities and different natural processes affect the land use/land cover of any area. The rapid alteration of land use and land cover than ever before particularly in developing countries often characterized by deforestation, land degradation and transformation of agricultural land ensuing enormous cost to the environment 3 . Over utilization of natural resources for meeting growing demand for food, fuel and fodder of increasing population leads to LULC changes within the watersheds 4 . Therefore, in order