Term of Award

Fall 2023

Degree Name

Master of Science, Applied Geography

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Geology and Geography

Committee Chair

Munshi Rahman

Committee Member 1

Wei Tu

Committee Member 2

Christine Hladik

Abstract

Due to the geographical setting, the Lakshmipur district of Bangladesh experiences adverse effects of global climate change that include but are not limited to natural disasters such as tropical cyclones, storm surges, coastal flooding, and riverbank erosion. While riverbank erosion is an implicit impact of climate change, it directly affects human settlements, agricultural activity, and the overall livelihoods of people in this area. Examining the spatiotemporal changes in land cover and population due to riverbank erosion in this region could help us better understand the dynamics of human-environmental relations. This study aimed to classify land cover for every five years from 2001-2021, examine land cover changes in this area from 2001-2021, map populations in Lakshmipur district for every five years from 2001-2021, and estimate population displacement due to riverbank erosion every five years from 2001-2021. Landsat 5 TM 30 m satellite Imagery from 2001-2011 and Landsat 8 OLI 30 m resolution Imagery from 2016-2021 were used to classify landcover and observed landcover changes from 2001-2021. We classified Imagery using the smile random forest classifier in Google Earth Engine and calculated landcover change using the Change Detection Wizard in ArcGIS Pro 3.0. The overall classification accuracies range between 79.04% to 87 %. Our landcover change result suggests that from 2001-2021 fallow land/agricultural land has lost the largest area of land, 341.81 sq km, to homestead forest and waterbody among all the classes. To map populations vector and raster-based dasymetric mapping approaches were used. The vector and raster-based binary dasymetric mapping and population displacement calculation were carried out in ArcGIS Pro 3.0. The findings suggest that the lowest number of population displacements (1844 people using vector-based approach and 5241 raster-based approach) happened from 2001-2006, and the highest number (86107 people using vector-based approach, 63453 using raster-based approach) were displaced between 2016-2021.

INDEX WORDS: Landcover Change, Population Mapping, Google Earth Engine, Riverbank Erosion, Dasymetric mapping, Population displacement, Lakshmipur District, Bangladesh.

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