The importance of the land cover map in many areas including environmental issues, regional
planning, sustainable development and many other issues has been considered in the global
literature. This study aims to detect land cover changes that occurred in a part of Cameron
Highlands, Pahang, Malaysia for a decade between early 2008 until the late 2017. However, in
this research Landsat-7 (ETM+) satellite data (2008 and 2017) were acquired and corrected using
environment for visualizing images (ENVI) software. Support vector machine (SVM) model was
used to classify land covers of both years. Results show that during this period of time forest has
underwent considerable changes among all from 49.517532 km2 in 2008 to just 34.90341 km2 by
the year 2017. The second substantial change belongs to vegetation and florification from 31.265611
km2 in 2008 to a peak of 42.83176 km2 by the year 2017. It means that forest mostly have been
replaced by vegetation and florification. Furthermore, the overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient
using confusion matrix for the year 2008, using support vector machine classification model are
96.4051% and 0.9294, respectively. While these values for the year 2017 are 97.5198% and 0.9674
in order. The current research can be valuable for land cover management in Cameron Highlands
by Malaysian policy and decision makers.
Keywords
Remote sensing techniques; Geographical information system; Landsat image; Cameron Highlands
ENIVRONMENT ASIA
Published by : Thai Society of Higher Education Institutes on Environment Contributions welcome at : http://www.tshe.org/en/
By using our website, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.