The Evaluation of Land Cover Change of The Watershed Area Using ASTER Image

Abstract ASTER image is already widely used by various parties in various part of the world for the phenomena observation of the environmental changes. The image processing is supervised classification of maximum likelihood technique to produce land cover into 8 main classes. This study evaluate the changes in land cover in the Lesti’s sub-watershed where is a sub-watershed priority in the Brantas river’s watershed. The result of this study is the land cover change in the upstream area which approximately 1,314 km2 (4.65%) of forest area is converted to another type of land use and its dominated by dry-farm agricultural sector which is in particular farm and field. This is due to the large area of land cover for dry-land farming in 1999 which is approximately 78.198 km2 (31,77%) for the field and 61.844 km2 (25,13 %) for the farm while in 2009 is approximately 97.219 km2 (39,50%) for the fields and 49.421 km2 (20,08%) for the farm from the total land area. The dry-land farming is one of the most factor causing erotion and landslide.