Vol. 3, Issue 10, Part E (2017)

Abstract
Land/Use refers to man’s activities on earth, which are directly related to land, whereas Land/Cover denotes the natural features and artificial constructions covering the land surface. Land/use practices of a region are influenced by a number of parameters namely physical and chemical environments, socio-economic factors and needs of the masses. Land is the basic, fixed and limited natural resource. The pressures on the natural resources have tremendously increased over years by man’s greed for commercialization and livelihood of local people. Devoid of regeneration, population and wide scale tree felling depleted the natural re-sources to a level, which posed a problem for the very sustenance of man. Therefore, it is imperative to understand the consequences of manmade initiatives and to devise proper strategies to counteract these detrimental effects to keep a balance of the environment, ecology, green cover, and human livelihood. Since time immemorial Environment and Development are going together as two wheels of cart. The monitoring of resource and temporal utilization through the multi-temporal IRS-P6 AWiFS satellite data provides detailed information about the land use land cover changes. This paper explores the temporal composition of the main Land-use/Land-cover (LULC) categories, examines the spatial configuration of the categories, and derives the probabilities of transitions in the Rania block of Sirsa district, Haryana. The present study aims to investigate the monitoring of resource and temporal utilization using multi-temporal IRS P6 AWiFS satellite data (2005-06 to 2015-16) of Rania block of Sirsa district and to identify the hot spots of land use changes pertaining to various categories. At the same time, land use and land cover transfer matrixes are used to assess the dynamic change trends for different land cover types. Double crop class covered 481.74 sq. km area in 2005-06 & 494.27 sq. km area in 2015-16. Double crop is the dominant class in both years i.e. 2005-06 and 2015-16 in Rania block.