2.7 Land use classification along the roadsides

We used high resolution remotely sensed Google Earth (Digital Globe; CNES/ Astrium) images for classification of different land use types along roadsides. To represent the status in 2003, we used images from the period between 2000 and 2006, since historical data from 2003 was not consistently available. We consistently used the earliest image possible for drawing the polygons. We omitted the Begur-Handpost road from these analyses, since images of this roadside were available only after 2010. We used images from 2015 to represent the 2015 period. We drew polygons representing different land use types on the clipped area of the roadside overlaid on the Google Earth image. If the roadsides were flattened for road construction, we considered that area as part of the road and not roadside. The different land use types considered for the classification were: vegetation (trees), urban area (man-made structures like buildings, roads, and aqueducts), barren area (area with no man-made structures) and water body. Geometric corrections were done after classification using ArcGIS 10.1. Further, we estimated the area covered by each land use type using ArcGIS 10.1.