The present investigation revealed that the various land use and land cover classes delineated include built-up, agriculture, sand, water, scrub and open/ barren land of Palani Town by using multi-sensor satellite data and to monitor the changes in various land use/ land cover classes using digital remote sensing techniques.. The spatial coverage of each class may be visualized on both maps. The area of each class for the year 2006 and 2011 data has been compiled.Land use/ land cover change monitoring of the study area were done through Landsat ETM and IRS-LISS-III digital Data of the year 2006 and 2011 respectively. The Anderson's multilevel classification system has been adopted. Image processing software and its GIS analysis capabilities have been used for the preparation of multi-date land use/ land cover maps and to monitor the change pattern. The SOI topographical map 63-G was georeferenced for registration, 9 well-distributed Ground Control Points (GCPs) at the intersection of latitude-longitude lines have been selected. The second order polynomial transformation with nearest neighborhood resampling technique has been. Process of image-to-image registration is then adopted for the registration of satellite imagery on already registered SOI topographical map. The land use/ land cover map of year 2006, depicts that built up area constitutes 17.2% of total area, while the agriculture classes like Crop land, Fallow and Plantation covers 70.0% the study area. Water bodies and Barren land covers 10% and 2% of area respectively. In year 2011, the built up area obtained from digital image processing techniques has been 25.7% of the total area. The agriculture covers an area of 61.6%, which shows a decrease in agriculture land. The water bodies covers 10.0% and barren area covers 2% of the study area. The increase in the area under built up lands may lead to a lot of environmental and ecological problems. The study was successfully able to detect vegetation change and concluded that the area of the urban has increased whereas the area of crop land and plantation has been decreased within the period 2006-2010. To sum up it could be stated that Palani Taluk is one of the biodiversity zones of the country is under the threat of environmental and ecological problems due to improper management.
