Assessment of Urban Foodbowl Using Spatiotemporal Analysis of Urban Growth

Abstract

Drastic transformations in land use often impact the sustaining capacity of a city, the major impact being the one on the productive agricultural land available in an urban area, termed as the “urban foodbowl”. This study tries to analyze the transitions in the productive agricultural land of the urban area of Palakkad, a city situated in Kerala, India, due to the impact of land cover changes. Landsat images obtained from remote sensing data were used to map the land cover of the study area at four time points, i.e., 2000, 2005, 2015, and 2020, which were then subjected to supervised classification into categories of built, water, open areas, plantations, forests, and agricultural land. The transition of agricultural land to other land uses was determined. Then, the factors most likely to have influenced were used to analyze the transitions measured earlier using logistic regression. An increase of 2,335,452 ha (500%) in the built-up area was found over a period of 20 years. The analysis revealed an increasing trend of transition from agricultural land to built-up land use which ranged from 1050.3 ha (2000–05) to 3540.24 ha (2015–20). The factor analysis revealed the influence of states of neighborhood cells, distances to the roads, and urban centers to be higher on the transition of agricultural land to other land uses. This study brings our attention to the impacts of the transformation of the urban landscape on the foodbowl which imposes challenges to the sustainability of food production in urban areas.