The Potential of use of integrated Hyperspectral and Multitemporal Multispectral Satellite Imagery Data for Small Scale Land Use Land Cover Mapping in Sri Lanka-Ampara District

Land cover indicates the physical land type such as forest or open water whereas land use documents how people are using the landscape-whether for development, conservation, or mix uses. The different type of land cover can be managed or used quite differently. Land use land cover (LULC) is being changed timely because of the human involved rapid development activities. So that updated LULC maps making is vital for daily applications. Spatial data acquisition is a main step in LULC map making. In-situ and remote sensing are the main techniques used to gather the required spatial data. Meanwhile remote sensing is being widely used because of its time and cost effective large area applicability. Especially satellite based Earth remote sensing techniques which are based on reflectivity or emissivity of Earth surface in different portions of electromagnetic (EM) spectrum, provide informative imageries. The LULC information can be extracted by using these imageries in appropriate way.