Spatial Analysis and Land use and land cover LULC classification in the irrigated Indus Basin for water management analysis using intelligent pixel information I Abstract Advanced modeling of hydrological processes in vast river basins and continental scale land atmosphere interactions requires land cover and land use information LULC information is often used to define the physical land surface properties such as curve numbers for runoff surface roughness for evapotranspiration ET albedo for ET vegetation cover for biodiversity rooting depth for available soil moisture drought resistance etc Hence modeling of the water balance and preparation of water accounting Molden 1997 requires LULC to be known The methodology that will be used is satellite based derived information on Normalized vegetation index NDVI with ground based information and crop growing pattern Different crop rotations will be identified using this information to get actual pattern of water use The main objective of the research is to develop up to date locally consistent and detailed LULC map with reasonable efforts that could also be used to acquire LULC information for other basins with water resources problems in other parts of the world The reason to select Indus Basin is because of it's under pressure water resources There is insufficient water to supply all water use sectors with sufficient quantity Although good efforts have been undertaken Habib 2004 there is a real need of time to better understand the hydrology and water management issues of the Indus Basin II Introduction The term land cover defines the physical conditions of the Land For water bare soil crops forests etc Land use exposes application that humans have applied for their own benefits
