Temporal Dynamics of Land Use Change and Spatial Urbanisation Indices in the Rural–Urban Interface of Bengaluru Over the Past Three Decades

To capture the overall dynamics of urbanisation in the research space of FOR2432, this study tracks the land cover changes within the two transects across the rural–urban interface of Bengaluru. It covers a retrospective period of almost three decades, with observations in 1992, 2000, 2011, and 2016, based on Landsat and Sentinel satellite images, and aims at unravelling the dynamics of land use change as a prelude to deeper explorations of its drives. The spatio-temporal analysis of broad land cover classes relates it to the agricultural activities described in subsequent chapters of this volume, while for built-up land cover the focus lies on urban sprawl and the evolution of the Survey Stratification Index (SSI). The results underpin that the loss of vegetated and agricultural area increases both, along a spatial gradient towards the city, and over time. The spatial urbanisation pattern described by the SSI remains rather stable if data are aggregated over rural, transitional, and urban regions, or over six predefined strata, while individual villages show pronounced shifts in the SSI, that characterise them as nuclei of urbanisation. Characteristics of the “urban fringe” are highly variable between successive land cover classifications and have high dynamics of change.