Forest Classification of Panna Tiger Reserve

Abstract

Land use landcover maps are widely used in managing natural terrestrial ecosystems especially for biodiversity conservation. The rate of deforestation to fulfil the demands of human needs, particularly agricultural expansion, has increased changes in forest cover and density. Therefore, detailed, up-to-date information for forest cover and crown density plays an important role in the conservation process. Considering this, a land use map for landcover and forest crown density of Panna Tiger Reserve was developed. Panna Tiger reserve is spread over in an area of 1578.12 km2 in Mahya Pradesh. A remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) were used in this study. The Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS of 24 April 2017 were used for the analysis. The entire study area was categorised into seven classes. Ground truthing was also performed. The result revealed that 42.27% of the total area was represented by dense forest followed by fairly dense forest (16.20%), open forest (13.01%), scrubland (14.07%), grassland with scattered trees (7.96%), fallow land (5.23%), and bodies of water (1.26%). Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was done for preparing the forest crown density map, which revealed that the majority of the forest cover (238.20 km2) was under a crown density of more than 70%.