Abstract

Gin catchment located in the Southern region of Sri Lanka has its land primarily used for natural and planted forest, agriculture and settlements. Though there exist a vital need to investigate how the prevailing land use in the catchment is going to alter subsequent to various anthropogenic activities, so far there have been no such attempts made. This study aims at carrying out spatially explicit land use change analysis across the Gin catchment in order to project the potential land use change in the year 2020 using a logistic regression approach based on Geographic Information System (GIS). In this study, probability of occurrence of a certain land use type was predicted by the socioeconomic, proximity and biophysical driving factors. Allocation of land use change was made in an iterative procedure given the probability maps, the spatial policies and restrictions in combination with the observed land use map in 1983 and the demand for the different land use types. Observed land use map in 1999 was used in validating the predictions. The results envisaged a predominant replacement of cultivations by forest and homestead/garden which seems to have driven jointly by the change in agricultural practices and increase in population.

Keywords:

Driving factors, Gin catchment, land use change, logistic regression, spatial analysis,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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The authors have no competing interests.