Abstract
Abstract. The Similipal is a densely forested hill-range in the heart of Mayurbhanj district,Orissa, lying close to the eastern-most end of the Easternghats. Similipal Biosphere Reserve is located in the Mahanadian Biogeographical Region and within the Biotic Province, Chhotanagpur Plateau.There are 4 villages in the core and 61 villages in the buffer area of the biosphere reserve .Agriculture is not well developed and employment opportunities are very poor , most of the people derive their income from collection of NTFP and sale of firewood and timber. A collaborative work is carried out by Regional Remote Sensing Centre(East) and Anthropological survey of India,Kolkata to study the impact of those four villages in the core area of SBR on the conservation of natural resources over the decades.Change in vegetation density as measured by NDVI over the decades is analysed to study the impact of these villages on the core area of Similipal Biosphere Reserve.
Highlights
Protected areas usually include ecosystems little modified by human activities
The present study aims to evaluate the decadal changes in terms of vegetation density as measured by NDVI in the core area of Similipal biosphere reserve in the area surrounding the four core villages
The different classes of NDVI and their aerial extent for 1975 and 2005 were presented in the table 2, it is observed that the NDVI class 0.5-0.6 occupies the maximum area for all the villages in both the year followed by the class >0.6.The decadal change is the highest in these classes where as other classes was very insignificant
Summary
Protected areas usually include ecosystems little modified by human activities. Similipal Biosphere Reserve is one of the seven biosphere reserve in india identified under man in Biosphere programme of UNESCO. Tropical forests are exploited for varied purposes as timber, slash-and-burn cultivation and pasture development (de Moraes et al, 1998) and vegetation changes are often the result of anthropogenic pressure (e.g. population growth) and natural factors such as variability in climate (Guerra et al, 1998; Janetos and Justice, 2000). In this regard, protected areas need periodic monitoring for effective conservation, management and planning. The NDVI is a reliable ecological indicator for successfully monitoring temporal and spatial variation in vegetation density as well as the health and viability of plant cover (Fung and Siu, 2000; Jiang et al, 2008; Wang, Price, and Rich, 2001; Weng, Lu, and Schubring, 2004) over a long period of time
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