Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2021 number 1

This paper presents an analysis of response of the ecosystem service value to land use/land cover (LULC) changes as well as of the spatial contribution from individual ecosystem service function changes of Barasat Sadar sub-division (West Bengal, India) during the period between 1977 and 2016 based on the modified coefficient. Landsat series satellite images were downloaded at about ten year’s intervals to envision occurrences in spatio-temporal LULC patterns. A supervised classification was performed based on maximum likelihood (MXL) classifier to identify the LULC characteristics. Ecosystem serviced value were calculated per hectares of the terrestrial ecosystem based on the coefficient of each land cover characteristics used in earlier research. The highest value of ecosystem service value was recorded for a surface waterbody in 2016 (477.06 million dollars) and the lowest value was estimated at 0.98 million dollars for fallow land. Our results suggest that deterioration in agricultural fallow, dense vegetation, scrub land and rapid expansion of crop land, and surface waterbody artificial infrastructure for the period of 1977-2016 led to an incessant loss of the total ecosystem service value to the tune of $238.92 million using the coefficient adopted in calculations. The outcome of the investigation can serve as a reference and basis for enlightening decision building concerning the management of land resources and subsidize to a trade-off between urban growth and the lessening in ecosystem services.