Relevance of the Cell Neighborhood Size in Landscape Metrics Evaluation and Free or Open Source Software Implementations

Assessment of agricultural prospects in relation to land use change and population pressure on a spatiotemporal framework

The urbanisation process moves quickly in emerging nations like India and Bangladesh, transforming natural landscapes into unsustainable landscapes. Consequently, growing development has had a significant impact on agricultural land as a natural environment. Moreover, there is a scarcity of research on fragmentation probability modelling in the extant literature. Thus, by combining random forest (RF) and bagging with the datasets which are multi-temporal in a GIS framework, the probability of fragmentation of LULC at Jangipur subdivision in India and Bangladesh can be modelled. Parallelepiped, Mohalnobis distance, support vector machines (SVM), spectral angle mapper (SAM), and artificial neural networks (ANN) classifiers were used for LULC classification, where SVM (Kappa coefficient: 0.87) surpassed other classifiers. The LULC maps for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 were created using the best classifier (SVM). During this time, the built-up area grew from 23.769 to 158.125 km². Then, using an ANN-based cellular automata model, the future LULC map for 2030 was predicted (CA-ANN). In 2030, the built-up area would be 201.58 km². Then the matrices of class and landscape were taken out of the LULC maps utilising FRAGSTAT software and included the patch number (NP), largest patch index (LPI), edge density (ED), contagion index (percentage) (CONTAG), perimeter and area (P/A), aggregation index (AI), landscape percentage (PLAND), the area of class (CA), patch density (PD), edge in total (TE), total core area (TCA), and largest shape index (LSI). The validation results revealed that bagging (0.915 = AUC) and RF (0.874 = AUC) are capable of assessing fragmentation probability, with the bagging model having the greatest precision level of the two. Almost 20% of the total LULC was in a high and very high zone of fragmentation vulnerability, necessitating the use of direct measures to safeguard it. As a result, adequate LULC management is required.