ISSN (E): 2305-9249
ISSN (P): 2305-9494
Islamabad was built in 1960 as a capital of Pakistan. It is a city famous for its beauty, greenery, and beautiful trees. The total area of Islamabad is 906 km2. With increasing population, a lot of development projects have been initiated within the city, which had a huge impact on the vegetation. Awareness of urban vegetation, environmental quality and knowledge is really important for conservation of natural resource, management and improvement of ecosystem of urban resources. The impact of these development activities on vegetation was assessed for the last twenty years within Islamabad using remote sensing techniques. For this purpose, satellite images of Landsat were acquired for 1992, 2000, and 2013. Supervised classification and NDVI analysis were done to calculate the area under vegetation and other classes of all the images. Analysis of these satellite images revealed that vegetation was very dense in the past, but with the passage of time the vegetation loss became significantly prominent. Sector wise analysis was done to find out the most vulnerable area with respect to vegetation loss. The included H-10, G-13, G-5, and D-13. Although, some initiatives are being introduced to control vegetation area, but they do not match the pace of vegetation loss. Necessary measures need to be taken to maintain and improve vegetation to the desired level.
Keywords:
Remote sensing, Normalized Difference Vegetation index (NDVI), Islamabad, Satellite images, Development activities
Citations:
Shaheen, Nusrat; Baig, Dr. Muhammad Anwar; Mahboob, Muhammad Ahsan; Akbar, Saeed; Khokar, Dr. Muhammad Fahim (2015); Application of Remote Sensing Technologies to detect the vegetation changes during past two decades in Islamabad, Pakistan; Journal of Social Sciences (COES&RJ-JSS), Vol. 4, No. 3, pp:886-885; https://doi.org/10.25255/jss.2015.4.2.886.900.
