ABSTRACT
Urbanisation has become part and parcel of our daily life. With advancement in time, the population is increasing rapidly, which is leading to expansion of urban areas. However, in this process, the issue of vegetation health has remained neglected. Rajarhat block of North 24 Parganas district in West Bengal is one such area that has experienced a rapid rate of urbanisation in the last few years accompanied by a decline in vegetation health. An attempt has been made in this paper to analyse the vegetation health of Rajarhat block from 1999 to 2019 by using normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) values, and also, an interrelationship with the normalised difference built-up index (NDBI) values has been drawn with the objective of identifying an inverse relationship between vegetation health and urbanisation. Both NDVI and NDBI values have been computed from multi-temporal Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM images using different algorithms. The study reveals that there has been a decline in vegetation health from 1999 to 2019, and areas of low NDVI values exhibit high NDBI values, hence validating the inverse relationship between vegetation health and urbanisation.
