Assessment of Forest Transitions and Regions of Conservation Importance in Udupi district, Karnataka

Abstract

The current study prioritizes regions of conservation importance at the disaggregated level in the Udupi district, Central Western Ghats, based on ecological, geo-climatic, land, and social aspects. Conservation importance regions (CIR) or Ecological Sensitive Regions (ESR) are the distinct ecological units with exceptional biotic and abiotic elements which need at most care and sustainable development. CIR prioritization at grid levels (5' × 5' grids or 9 × 9 km) acts as a spatial decision support system to better understand the forest landscape dynamics and planning. The analyses of forest landscape dynamics using the temporal remote sensing data in reveal an increase in built-up areas by 8.8% with a decline in forest cover, resulting in the rise in maximum temperature by 40C in Udupi district during 1990-2018. Multivariate statistical analysis is done to understand the role of landscape dynamics on the land surface temperature (LST). The correlation analysis shows an increasing trend of LST across the CIR region with r = 0.8 where CIR 1 indicates the lowest temperature and CIR 4 has the maximum temperature.