ABSTRACT
The associations and interrelationships between land use and land cover and climate of the place are complex and many sided. Studies on land use and land cover change (LULCC) exhibit important understandings in forest cover assessments and the concomitant biomass; the regional variations in climate change as well as help in enumerating forward and backward connections amongst LULCC, climate change, and anthropocentric activities of the environment. That the climate system of any place is affected by LULCCs through bio-geophysical, bio-geochemical, and energy exchange processes is a well-established relationship. Changes in land cover affect the reflectance of the land surface, influencing the fraction of the sun’s energy absorbed by the land surface and thus affecting heat and moisture fluxes. These processes also create changes in the rate of vegetation transpiration and surface waterlines and cause the division of absorbed surface heat into latent and sensible heat fluxes. Simultaneously, vegetation changes determine surface roughness, thereby, thus air momentum and heat transport. The paper focuses on the land use and land cover changes that have taken place in the Barak Valley of Assam as a case study to bring out such linkages. Barak Valley is taken to be the area that forms the basin of the Barak River, located between 92° 15′ east to 93° 15′ east and 24° 8′ north to 25° 8′ north, an area of 6,922 sq. km. The districts covered under this region are Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi. The study examines the historic and current land use and land cover change through analyses of LANDSAT data from GLCF. LULCC is examined through time periods of 1978, 1988, 1998 and 2006. On ground testing has been done by correlating the satellite imagery data with statistical data of land use and cropping pattern change. Rainfall and temperature
data has then been correlated with the imageries showing the impact on the climate. This study addresses the spatial and temporal changes of the LULCC components, issues like impact of institutions, land fragmentation and degradation have not been considered here.
