Assessment of vegetation status of Sali River basin, a tributary of Damodar River in Bankura District, West Bengal, using satellite data

Abstract

Vegetation status of Sali River basin has been evaluated in this study applying the Landsat 8 data. Here, NDVI, EVI, GI, LAI, PVI, SI, BI and NDMI have been used to assess vegetation status (VS). Indices have been classified into five categories following natural breaks classification method. Apart from BI, all the indices represented higher value in forest cover area. Weights for all the themes and sub-themes were assigned following multi-criteria decision analysis with consistency ratio of 0.0685, and weighted overlay analysis technique had been employed for the assessment of the vegetation status. Very low, low and moderate VS was found mainly over the water body, urban and agricultural area, which is covering more than half of the basin. The rest of the area is covered with high and very high VS, representing fragmented and dense Sal forest and covering 15.81% and 22.88% basin area, respectively. Accuracy assessment and thorough field verification were done with 90.43% classification accuracy. Our result is quite similar to land use land cover map of Bhuvan, ISRO. So, keeping in the view of health of the river basin and vegetation, this area needs urgent attention to control the degradation of vegetation in a scientific way.