Abstract
The increasing population in the developing countries has rendered wetlands vulnerable to land use changes. Remote sensing offers a rapid and efficient means of data acquisition of ecosystems in time and space. The present study was undertaken to identify changes in the Harike wetland, a Ramsar site in the state of Punjab, India; and identify causal factors, as well as vulnerable areas threatened from the land cover changes. Unsupervised classification and post-classification change detection techniques were applied to Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data of 16-10-1989, 22-10-2000 and 26-10-2010. Images were classified into five land cover classes (1) Waterbody, (2) Wetland I, (3) Wetland II, (4) Barren land and (5) Agricultural land. Land cover change is characterized mainly by a decrease in the wetland area, as indicated by decrease in wetland vegetation and an increase in non-wetland areas, characterized by increasing agricultural and barren land areas. Overall, the wetland shrunk by 13% from 1989 to 2010, with the north-eastern side experiencing maximum shrinkage. The wetland needs immediate reclamation to check it from further shrinkage so as to save its biodiversity.