**4.1 Landuse and landcover**

Landuse and Landcover is one of the important causative factor for landslide risk and initiation. Urbanization along hilly areas and unstable constructions lead to slope instability causing slope failure. The LULC has interpreted from LANDSAT OLI imagery for the year 2020. Supervised classification method has been use to map Land cover of the study area. Shimla Tehsil has been classified into four classes namely Forest, Agriculture, Slopes and Settlement (**Table 4**). The classification was based NRSC Level I classification system of Landuse.

Among the various land covers forest is comprised of 63.4% of the total area. Agriculture and barren land together makes 26.7% of the study area. Settlement account for only about 9.7% of the study area (**Figure 4**). The occurrences of mass movements of landslides are minimal along forest due to its soil binding capacity. Tree root bind the soil to the ground avoiding soil erosion due to torrential and monsoon rainfall. In places such as slopes and settlements soils are exposed without vegetation cover and hence prone to a large No. of landslides during monsoon season in the stud area.
