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the highly productive agricultural lands have been converted to other uses, thereby

alarming an immediate attention in this direction. The major types of land use/ land
cover existing in the watershed during the two years namely 1989 and 2005. Within

this 16 years period the built up and the plantation has increased to a larger extent
whereas the wet agricultural area and forest cover has declined. The images show an

increase in the areal extent of water body owing to the increase in the stored water in

the reservoirs during 2005 has been considered for the analysis. The sandy area has
also shown an increasing trend in its areal extent during the study period. The cost

effectiveness and easy mapping procedures from satellite images using GIS and
image processing softwares have reduced the time consumed for data collection,

which is very important in such temporal studies. Thus, it has been concluded that

remote sensing and image processing techniques can be used as an effective tool in
the monitoring of land use/ land cover change studies.