Abstract:
Land use Information is the fundamental to manipulate effectively the valuable and
important Land resources in a country. Land use information is measured by Land use surveys.
Land use refers to the human activities in join to a particular land while Land cover refers to
natural and artificial scenarios which cover the land. This land use and land cover causes into
changes due to the influence of human, physical factors and creates positive and negative
effects. Rapid changes are being occurred in land use by the development activities conducted
in the Jaffna Peninsula during the post war period. Researches about Land use and its changes
and attempts to map them have been carried out for several decades. Remote sensing
technology is a developed technology and widely used to map the land use pattern and to detect
the changes of land use. In this study, land use/land cover mapping and change detection was
carried out using pre and post image classification methods in Mandaitivu Island of the Jaffna
Peninsula. Primary data were collected from the field for the image classification and accuracy
testing. As a result of the study, it was observed that paddy land has been reducing significantly
and on the other hand, home garden has been increasing since 1999. In addition to this land
fragmentation and loss of land productivity were reported. This study will be useful to
minimize in-concurrent land use changes and to carry out the land use survey using appropriate
methods.
