Abstract
Long-term land cover changes play a significant driver of ecosystem and function of natural biodiversity. Hence, their analysis can be used for evaluating and supporting government plans, especially conservation and management of natural habitats such as sago palm. In Papua Province of Indonesia, sago palm has been stated as one of the priority plants in the Medium-Term Development Plan (R.P.J.M.). However, limited studies have examined this palm in one of the Regencies of Papua Province, namely, Merauke Regency. In this study, we performed remotely sensed data imagery and supervised classification to produce land cover maps from 1990 to 2019. During the study period, twenty-one land cover classes were identified. The six classes of the natural forest consist of primary dryland forest, secondary dryland forest, primary mangrove forest, secondary mangrove forest, primary swamp forest, and secondary swamp forest; thus, fifteen classes of non-forested area. Concerning the sago palm habitat, our study evaluated two different categories (1) based on the land cover scheme from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and (2) according to the peatland land cover ecosystem in Papua. Based on paired samples t-test, the result indicated statistically significant changes specifically at primary dryland (p-value = 0.015), grassland (p-value = 0.002) and swamp (p-value = 0.007). Twelve from 20 districts of Merauke Regency tend to lose the forecasted natural habitat of the sago palm. Therefore, this study suggests the further need to recognize and estimate the yield of sago palm area in these various ecosystems.
Highlights
The land cover indicates the physical land class covered by swamp forests, mining areas, and other land cover classes
Twenty-one land cover categories were identified: (1) 6 classes of the natural forest included primary dryland forest, secondary dryland forest, primary mangrove forest, primary swamp forest, secondary mangroves forest, secondary swamp forest; (2) 15 classes of non-forest consisting of swamp shrub, swamp, bush/shrub, estate crop plantation, settlement area, barren land, clouds, grassland, water body, dryland agriculture, shrub-mixed dryland, paddy field, fishpond, airport, transmigration area (Figure 3)
Merauke land cover consists of twenty-one classes, which are classified into six classes of natural forest and fifteen classes of non-forested areas
Summary
The land cover indicates the physical land class covered by swamp forests, mining areas, and other land cover classes. Land use refers to the purpose land serves, for example, recreation and wildlife habitat. Land cover and land use are often used reciprocally, but both of them can be performed to support various purposes, for instance, identification and change detection [1,2]. Land cover changes information is useful to achieve a better perspective of landscape dynamics and is proper for evaluating the sustainability of natural resources [3,4]. Ground cover monitoring and mapping are required to investigate spatial planning and environmental examination [5,6]. Land cover and land use analysis will help in the reliable prediction of future circumstances. Future changes in forest cover can be predicted using the substance gained from historical datasets and remote sensing observations [7]
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