Abstract
Abstract. Indian natural forest has a high ecological significance as it holds much biodiversity and is primarily affected due to deforestation. The present study exhibits the forest cover change on Global Forest Non-Forest (FNF) data for India and greenness trend using MOD15A2H LAI product, which is the best product available till date. JAXA uses of SAR datasets for forest classification based on FAO definitions. Later, Forest Survey of India (FSI) used different definitions for forest classification from FAO and was to compare with JAXA based forest cover. The global FNF study exhibited that total forest cover was reduced from 568249 Km2 to 534958 Km2 during 2007–17 in India. The significant loss of forest cover (33291.59 Km2; by −5.85% change) was primarily evident in Eastern Himalayas followed by Western Himalayas. Whereas forest cover increase was observed in Eastern and the Western Ghats from 2007 to 2017. The state of forest report by FSI states an increase in the forest cover from 690889 Km2 to 708273 Km2 during 2007–17 by 2.51%. The difference in forest cover as estimated by JAXA global FNF datasets and FSI report is attributed to differences in forest cover mapping definitions by both the agencies and use of varied datasets (SAR datasets by JAXA and optical datasets by FSI). It is to note that SAR is highly sensitive to forest cover and vegetation’s as compare to optical datasets. Recent satellite-based (2000–2018) LAI product reveals the increase in leaf area of vegetation during 2000–18. It may be attributed to proper human land use management and implications of green revolutions in the region. The greening in India is most evident from the croplands with insignificant contribution from forest cover.
Highlights
Forest is the most essential and critical element of earth's surface, and its dynamics on the landscape are driven by both human activities and natural processes (Morales-Díaz et al 2019; Tucker and Richards 1989)
As per recent Forest Survey of India report, it claims that Indian forest cover has been increased by 0.94% of total area (FSI, 2017), while some experts point out that government often keeps claiming that the green cover is increasing, but it is usually due to plantations and not due to expansion of forest covers (Padma, 2018)
Forest Cover change has been analysed using JAXA global Forest Non-Forest (FNF) datasets with 25 m spatial resolution between 2007 and 2017 and found that there is a huge decrease in a forest cover in India which is around 33291.59 Km2
Summary
Forest is the most essential and critical element of earth's surface, and its dynamics on the landscape are driven by both human activities and natural processes (Morales-Díaz et al 2019; Tucker and Richards 1989). Due to expansion of agricultural land, urban areas and various human-induced changes have caused extensive damage to Indian forests and results in loss of biodiversity hotspot in major regions: The Indo-Burma hotspot, Terai regions of Himalayas and Western Ghats (Datta and Deb, 2012; Deb et al, 2018; Myers et al, 2000; Reddy et al, 2019) To accost this mass and severe deforestation and degradation of ecology, the MoEF, as well as Indian Forestry Department, have declared major regions of forest regions as a biosphere, national parks, sanctuaries or reserve forest and increased the management for conservation in those areas. Apart from deforestation in India some studies suggested that India is greening (Zhang et al, 2017) due to proper land use management as a direct factor whereas climate change and CO2 fertilization as dominant indirect factors (Chen et al, 2019; Zeng et al, 2014; Zhu et al, 2016) by analysing Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from remotely sensed datasets. The greening and browning trend from 16 days LAI datasets were analysed to map the spatiotemporal variability in greenness in the Indian region
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