Assessment of urban sprawl using landscape metrics and Shannon’s entropy model approach in town level of Barrackpore sub-divisional region, India

A city has expanded from the core to peripheral areas through the growth of urbanization process and based on criteria, such as economic development, social, political forces as well as morphological characteristics. Due to increases in the population and anthropogenic activities in a city, the spatial boundary has also extended to provide accommodation along with the fringe areas that lead to fragmentation of urban morphology and influence the local ecology. From the historical past to present conditions and future predictions of urban growth would be able to visualize by space-borne remote sensing techniques to plan the appropriate infrastructure of the city. The present study analyzed the spatio-temporal land-use patterns in the town level in the Barrackpore sub-division area of West Bengal, which has become very compact urban areas in the eastern zone of the country. The spatial assessment of the urban growth pattern of 16 municipalities has been analyzed using remotely sensed data for the year of 1972, 2001 and 2016 with the spatial landscape metrics approach and Shannon’s entropy model. The overall scenario of land use changes reveals that the non-urban areas (vegetation, agriculture, wetland and water bodies) have been decreasing, on the other hand, built-up areas are increasing during the decades. Spatial landscape metrics indicate the nature of the fragmentation of the urban landscape, compactness of the towns and provided the intensity about the sprawl characteristics. The results show that the whole urban landscapes of every town are aggregating into a large patch in the recent years (2016) as compared to the past years. The fragmentation of landscape into small patches happened from 1972 to 2001 on a large scale that indicates sprawl; the conversion of small patches to large single urban patches can be seen from 2001 to 2016 pointed out the maximally aggregation of town  which would affect the ecological environment. Shannon’s entropy model was applied to understand the level of urban growth at every corner of municipalities by the zoning of each town. The value of Shannon’s model confirms the dispersed random urbanization in the outskirt of the towns. The spatio-temporal urban sprawl monitoring through these two methods would help the towns’ administration, planners to manage and take better planning to build sustainability for livelihood.