Abstract:
Islamabad was built in 1960 as a capital of Pakistan. It is a city famous for its
beauty, greenery, and beautiful trees. The total area of Islamabad is 906 km2
. With
increasing population, a lot of development projects have been initiated within the
city, which had a huge impact on the vegetation. Awareness of urban vegetation,
environmental quality and knowledge is really important for conservation of natural
resource, management and improvement of ecosystem of urban resources. The impact
of these development activities on vegetation was assessed for the last twenty years
within Islamabad using remote sensing techniques. For this purpose, satellite images
of Landsat were acquired for 1992, 2000, and 2013. Supervised classification and
NDVI analysis were done to calculate the area under vegetation and other classes of
all the images. Analysis of these satellite images revealed that vegetation was very
dense in the past, but with the passage of time the vegetation loss became
significantly prominent.
Vegetated area estimated for 1992, 2002, and 2013 shows that the total area
under vegetation is 58, 50, and 34 % respectively of the total area of Islamabad. The
overall rate of vegetation loss between 1992 to 2013 was 10.02 km2
(per year) which
is 1.09 %. Furthermore sector wise analysis was done to find out the most vulnerable
area with respect to vegetation loss. The included H-10, G-13, G-5, and D-13.
Residential sectors (G-13 and D-13) were found to be at high risk as compared to
educational sectors (H-10 and H-12) and diplomatic enclave (G-5). Although, some
initiatives are being introduced to control vegetation area, but they do not match the
pace of vegetation loss. Necessary measures need to be taken to maintain and improve
vegetation to the desired level.
