Dynamics of land use and land cover in Northern India: a systematic review

The sole purpose of this review paper is to reveal the land use and land cover (LULC) changes in the study region (Northern India) from 2017 to 2021. The researchers discovered that no systematic review of the LULC dynamics of the study region had been conducted so far. This study used a novel systematic review procedure (i.e., the ICA framework) to conduct the review process. The data for this study were retrieved from the Web of Science of Clarivate Analytics, using keywords related to LULC. A thorough review of 29 full-text articles was done to examine the primary land use classes (LUC), techniques used, factors responsible, and dynamics of the major land classes. Most articles included agriculture, built-up, water bodies, and plantations as the main LULC categories. Most of them used on-screen digitisation and supervised algorithms to classify LULC classes and incorporated accuracy assessment to validate their results. It was also found that almost all the papers cited climate change, increasing population, urbanisation, and economic considerations as the main drivers responsible for the changes that occurred in different LULCs. The findings of the various studies revealed that horticulture and built-up areas have increased while agricultural, forest cover and open spaces have decreased to a greater extent. Environmental negatives of LULC dynamics of the region suggested that LULC change is not favourable everywhere. Thus, to control the haphazard LULC change, the government must come up with a substantial land conversion policy in the region with ground-level implantation that will restrict the people from blind land conversion.