Estimation of Forest Canopy Cover and Forest Fragmentation Mapping Using Landsat Satellite Data of Silabati River Basin (India)

Biswajit Bera,Sumana Bhattacharjee,Soumik Saha

doi:10.1007/s42489-020-00060-1

Biswajit Bera, Sumana Bhattacharjee + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s42489-020-00060-1

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Abstract

Forest is an imperative part of environment but in the recent years, forest areas are being transformed due to population expansion, unscientific urbanization and a rising trend of industrialization in some countries. Dense forests habitats have been fragmented into patch forest region. This paper attempts to find out the forest canopy or crown density and forest fragmentation areas as well as to identify the spatiotemporal changing paradigms of forest within the Silabati river basin. Forest Canopy Density and fragmentation models are an important craftsmanship to examine the health of the forest or vegetation in a given area. Various indices such as Normalize Difference Vegetation Index, Advanced Vegetation Index, Shadow Index, Bareness Index and ultimately weightage overlay analysis methods have been adopted to determine forest health or anthropogenic stress on forest habitats. Higher weight has been assigned to dense forest areas and open forest area has been given lower weight. The result shows that forest canopy or crown cover as well as forest density are radically reduced in between the time period 1998 and 2009. It is also stated that the total 116.549 km2 areas have been degraded during 11 years period (1998–2009) with a rate of 10.59 km2/year. Meanwhile, 180.02 km2 forest areas have been regained in between 2019 and 2009 with a rate of 18 km2/year that is possible only due to implementation of forest policies exclusively execution of participatory or joint forest management techniques.

Highlights

Forest means a large tract or land which is covered by trees, underbrush and woodland
The scheduled tribes and other tribal dwellers act of 2006 gave a right to tribal people regarding the protection of biodiversity and simultaneously eco-friendly use of forest resources. This geospatial application-based study is focused on existing canopy density and forest fragmentation in Silabati river basin with the integration of four different indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Advanced Vegetation Index, Shadow Index and Bareness Index
The forest report 1985 clearly states that around 28.03% area was under open scrub which is confined in the lower course of the basin

Summary

Introduction

Forest means a large tract or land which is covered by trees, underbrush and woodland. Forests are being degraded by industrial and agricultural revolution, so appropriate scientific land-use planning is indispensable for forest resource conservation (Crist and Cicone 1984). Today many developing countries have monitored the spatiotemporal changing patterns and phenomenal growth of forest through Forest Canopy Density (FCD) model (Rikimaru 1997). Rikimaru was first used FCD model by thematic mapper data, but recently it is widely used to audit forest health and deforestation. It is vastly applied in the tropical forest areas to estimate the forest land degradation as well as afforestation rates within the forest and in the forest buffer (Azizi 2008). Forest fragmentation tool in GIS platform may take a momentous role to forest management and sustainable conservation of forest habitat system (Reddy 2013)

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