Summary: | Alterations in land use and land cover, either natural or anthropogenic can disturb the balance of fragile ecosystems. Climate change plays a unique role in governing the structure and state of land features and alters the structure of ecosystem as well as its services required by earth. Human health and environment are matter of concern due to changes induced by human in its natural environment (Jat et al., 2008). Human has an urge to remain near nature, for that they shift from dense urban areas to less dense areas (Western, 2001). So is the case of new housing societies where the land mafias intimate the people about new settlements (Zaman and Baloch, 2011), which are made by cutting the forests, removing trees and disturbing the ecosystem. For proper planning and management of natural resources, it is necessary to study the land cover and its associated changes (Asselman and Middelkoop, 1995). Modelling of changes within land cover to identify environmental trends on the local, national or regional level, have been realized in the scientific community (Nath et al., 2020). GIS/RS provides continuous change dynamics (Berlanga-Robles and Ruiz-Luna, 2011) of land cover/land use, i.e. by satellite monitoring (Ruiz-Ruano et al., 2016). The understanding of land cover changes is necessary for decision making (Lu et al., 2004) in the natural resource management (Seif et al., 2012). This study was carried out to identify the impact of changes in climate upon land use and land cover of Chakwal district from 1995 to 2020. Geospatial techniques were applied to estimate the differences in land features, using different time interval satellite datasets (Table 1). Six major classes of land features including, agriculture, bare land, built-up, forest, shrubs/grass and water were selected for this study, with respect to time.
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