Land Cover Mapping for Namdapha National Park (Arunachal Pradesh), India Using Harmonized Land Cover Legends

Abstract

Since last few decades RS-GIS is playing vital role in studying and mapping spatiotemporal responses of land cover, however, as a matter of fact, the mapping outputs largely depend on the expert's/user's preferences because location specific and people specific land cover classification systems are adopted autonomously for image classification in GIS. This may actually lead to an ambiguous definition of a particular land cover type when such different maps are compared at global level. In 1993, FAO and UNEP started efforts for development of a software tool know as LCCS which is a comprehensive standardized tool capable of providing land cover characterization to all possible land cover types in the world regardless of spatial relevance, mapping scale, data collection method etc. Adding to the global efforts of land cover legend harmonization and mapping, this study presents development of harmonized land cover legends for Namdapha National Park located in north-eastern Indian Himalayan region using LCCS and subsequent mapping. The potential of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in forest/land cover mapping is very well recognized. Therefore, adopting the developed harmonized legends for the study area, land cover mapping was done using RS-GIS approach.