Remote sensing in EIA is particularly useful for:

Question

Remote sensing in EIA is particularly useful for:

1. A. Measuring employee income
2. B. Monitoring land-use/land-cover changes, vegetation status, and water bodies (Correct answer)
3. C. Estimating legal liabilities
4. D. Conducting interviews with affected people

Correct Answer

Option B — Monitoring land-use/land-cover changes, vegetation status, and water bodies

Detailed Solution & Explanation

The correct answer is Monitoring land-use/land-cover changes, vegetation status and water bodies over time.

Key Points

• Remote sensing acquires information about the earth's surface from satellite or airborne sensors without physical contact. Its distinctive contributions to EIA are wide areal coverage and repeated observation of the same area over time.
• That makes it suited to tracking land-use and land-cover change, vegetation condition, and the extent of water bodies — exactly the parameters that shift measurably as a project is built and operated.
• The rejected options describe socio-economic or legal enquiries that require interviews and records, not imagery.

Additional Information

• The temporal dimension is what matters most. Archived imagery lets an assessor reconstruct conditions before the project even began, which is often the only way to establish a genuine pre-project baseline retrospectively.
• Vegetation is assessed through indices computed from reflectance, most commonly the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which exploits the contrast between red absorption and near-infrared reflection by healthy foliage.
• Resolution governs what questions can be answered: coarse imagery suits regional land-cover change, while high-resolution data are needed for individual structures or narrow watercourses.
• In India, ISRO's Resourcesat, Cartosat and RISAT series supply much of the data used in environmental studies, distributed through NRSC's Bhuvan platform.
• Remote sensing and GIS are complementary — remote sensing acquires the spatial data, GIS analyses and overlays it.