Classification of land use/land cover changes using GIS and remote sensing technique in Lake Kenyir Basin, Terengganu, Malaysia

Geographical information system (GIS) techniques and Remote Sensing (RS) data are fundamental in the study of land use (LU) and land cover (LC) changes and classification. The aim of this study is to map and classify the LU and LC change of Lake Kenyir Basin within 40 years' period (1976 to 2016). Multitemporal Landsat images used are MSS 1976, 1989, ETM+ 2001 and OLI 8 2016. Supervised Classification on Maximum Likelihood Algorithm method was used in ArcGIS 10.3. The result shows three classes of LU and LC via vegetation, water body and built up area. Vegetation, which is the dominant LC found to be 100%, 88.83%, 86.15%, 81.91% in 1976, 1989, 2001 and 2016 respectively. While water body accounts for 0%, 11.17%, 12.36% and 13.62% in the years 1976, 1989, 2001 and 2016 respectively and built-up area 1.49% and 4.47 in 2001 and 2016 respectively. The predominant LC changes in the study are the water body and vegetation, the earlier increasing rapidly at the expense of the later. Therefore, proper monitoring, policies that integrate conservation of the environment are strongly recommended.