False Color Composites

As an exploratory first step towards documenting changes in land use and land cover in the selected area, we visually compared spatial changes in the study region. We used false colored red-green-blue (RGB) composites of different band combinations of these datasets to qualitatively analyze this change and found several areas that showed visible change in terms of the forest cover and changes in the sizes of water bodies. Shown in figure 2 below are false colored red-green-blue composites of bands 5, 4, and 3 of the study region showing land use and land cover features from 1991, 2000, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

Figure 2. False colored RGB composites of bands 5,4,3 from 1991(top left), 2000 (top right), 2009 (middle left), 2010 (middle right), and 2011 (lower left) showing different land use and land cover features and changes in them.