抄録
Western Sri Lanka has a variety of threats to wetlands with increasing trend. There is growing pressure of various anthropogenic activities, alteration of wetland areas to agricultural land, and illegal human settlements around the wetland. This study uses remote sensing images of two time periods (during 2001-2016) and GIS to interpret the chronological, spatial data of the wetland landscape changes over the 15 years time span. Research result shows that the wetland system in this study area presents a trend of widely extent urban-rural situation with rapid land use changes of urban expansion and that different driving forces make a complicated pattern of this wetland ecosystem.
