Land change syndromes identification in temperate forests of Hindukush Himalaya Karakorum (HHK) mountain ranges (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications
The world's ecosystem and environment are rapidly deteriorating with an increase in the depletion of forest conditions due to forest fires. In recent past years, wildfire incidents in Sikkim have increased due to severe climatic changes such as turbulent rainfall, untimely summers, extreme droughts in winters, and a reduction in the percentage of yearly rainfall. Forest fires are one of the numerous kinds of disasters that impose disastrous changes on the entire environment and disrupt the complex correspondence of the flora and fauna. The research's goal is to examine the vegetation indices based on different climates to know why forest vegetation is decreasing day by day from 2000 to 2023. The frequent changes in forest vegetation are extensively studied by using satellite images. This data has been collected by three satellites Landsat-5, Landsat-8, and Landsat-9 on different vegetation indices NDVI, EVI, and NDWI. East Sikkim area is chosen to compute forest vegetation indices based on the heap's landmass this region is unexplored yet and also studied about the forest changes by using different spatial temporal indices in the range of the entire district in the future. The authors of this paper have used Landsat multi-spectral data to assess changes in the area of vegetation in a subtropical region like a dense forest region in east Sikkim. The analysis depicts space images, computes vegetation indices (NDVI, EVI, NDWI), and accomplishes mathematical computation of findings. The proposed method will be helpful to discuss the variance of vegetation in the entire East Sikkim region at the time span of 2000-2023. In the analysis, we find that mean and standard deviation values change over the years in all indices. Later, we also calculated changes by using a classification model and find a total 10% change in forest areas in approximately 22 years.
Patterns and Implications of Land Use/Cover Change
Mountain Research and Development, 2002
Crop-livestock mixed settled farming, the primary occupation of the local people in the central and western Himalaya, is dependent on forests to provide most of the livestock feed and forest leaf litter that is mixed with livestock excreta for use as manure . Agricultural expansion at the cost of forest cover is widespread . However, there are reports of tree cover improvement in the recent decades in a few villages . Agriculture-forest-rural economy linkages have not been as comprehensively analyzed as the spatial extent of land use/cover changes. The aim of the present study was to analyze the patterns, causes, and ecological and socioeconomic implications of land use/cover changes during the 1963-1993 period in Pranmati Watershed in the Indian Himalaya.
2010
The present landscape structure and function is the result of centuries of changes produced both by natural processes and human driving forces. For centuries many mountain and hillside areas have been the subject of deforestation to create space for agriculture and grazing, although the abandonment of traditional mountain agriculture has produced a natural forest recovery in many regions of the world. The physical changes imposed on the landscape by the development of secondary woodland have brought both positive and negative consequences, depending on the geographical and economic context and on the scale of the sites. Among the ecological problems caused by natural reforestation, one of great interest is the reduction of open spaces resulting in a loss of landscape heterogeneity and mosaic features. This review paper focused its attention on landscape metrics or indices that are frequently used to assess the structural characteristics of the landscape and to monitor changes in land use: mean patch size (MPS), connectivity (CONN), boundary length (BL) and the patch number (NP). Through the analysis of 52 selected papers and 53 case studies, we identified the main gaps in current knowledge, providing directions for further research. Most of the reviewed studies focused only on a portion of the spatial attributes that we were interested in and only 32 case studies reported accurate data both on forest expansion rate and time range analyzed in the study area. We conclude that the study of changes in all the spatial attributes considered within the same case study is a key to explain ecological consequences in mosaic cycles or in stochastic dynamic landscapes that emerged from the interplay of several processes, and to predict and explain their spatial and temporal characteristics. The current knowledge of how changing spatial attributes affect biodiversity, habitats, and ecosystem functions is limited by the scarcity of studies that explicitly consider the shifting in time of the four spatial attributes together.
GIScience & Remote Sensing , 2018
Land-use changes as a result of residential development often lead to degradation and alter vegetation cover (VC). Although these are worldwide phenomena, sufficient knowledge about anthropogenic effects caused by various populated areas in dryland ecosystems is lacking. This study explored anthropogenic development in rural areas and its effects on the conservation of protected areas in drylands, focusing on the change in VC, the reasons, extent, and the drivers of change. We propose a novel framework for exploring VC change (VCC) as a function of environmental and human-driven factors including different types of populated areas in drylands. As a case study, we used a 30-year time series of Landsat satellite images over the arid region of Israel to analyze spatiotemporal VCC. The temporal analysis involved the Contextual Mann-Kendall significance test and spatial analysis to model clustering of VCC. A Gradient Boosted Regression machine learning algorithm was applied to study the relative influence of environmental and human-driven factors on VCC. In addition, we used ANOVA to examine differences between the effects of three types of populated areas on the spatiotemporal trends of VC. The results show that the most influential environmental variable on VCC was elevation (relative contribution of 17%), followed by slope (14.8%) and distance from populated areas (14.6%). Moreover, different types of populated areas affected VC differently with varying distances from residential centroids. The nature reserves increased VC positively and significantly, while livestock settlements had a negative effect. Change in vegetation was mostly confined to the stream network and occurred in lower elevations. The study demonstrates how different land-use practices alter the landscape in terms of VC and differ in their extents, patterns, and effects. With the expected growth in population and residential development worldwide, the proposed framework may assist conservation managements and policy makers in minimizing environmental degradation in drylands.
Land use change detection in Solan Forest Division, Himachal Pradesh, India
Background: Monitoring the changing pattern of vegetation across diverse landscapes through remote sensing is instrumental in understanding the interactions of human activities and the ecological environment. Land use pattern in the state of Himachal Pradesh in the Indian Western Himalayas has been undergoing rapid modifications due to changing cropping patterns, rising anthropogenic pressure on forests and government policies. We studied land use change in Solan Forest Division of Himachal Pradesh to assess species wise area changes in the forests of the region. Methods: The supervised classification (Maximum likelihood) on two dates of IRS (LISS III) satellite data was performed to assess land use change over the period 1998–2010. Results: Seven land use categories were identified namely, chir pine (Pinus roxburghii) forest, broadleaved forest, bamboo (Dendrocalamus strictus) forest, ban oak (Quercus leucotrichophora) forest, khair (Acacia catechu) forest, culturable blank and cultivation. The area under chir pine, cultivation and khair forests increased by 191 ha (4.55 %), 129 ha (13.81 %) and 77 ha (23.40 %), whereas the area under ban oak, broadleaved, culturable blank and bamboo decreased by 181 ha (16.58 %), 152 ha (6.30 %), 71 ha (2.72 %) and 7 ha (0.47 %), respectively. Conclusions: The study revealed a decrease in the area under forest and culturable blank categories and a simultaneous increase in the area under cultivation primarily due to the large scale introduction of horticultural cash crops in the state. The composition of forests also exhibited some major changes, with an increase in the area of commercially important monoculture plantation species such as pine and khair, and a decline in the area of oak, broadleaved and bamboo which are facing a high anthropogenic pressure in meeting the livelihood demands of forest dependent communities. In time deforestation, forest degradation and ecological imbalances due to the changing forest species composition may inflict irreversible damages upon unstable and fragile mountain zones such as the Indian Himalayas. The associated common property externalities involved at local, regional and global scales, necessitate the monitoring of land use dynamics across forested landscapes in developing future strategies and policies concerning agricultural diversification, natural forest conservation and monoculture tree plantations.
International Journal of Research, 2020
The present study analyzes the land use and land cover changes in a forested ecosystem of the Eastern Ghats in the Andhra Pradesh state of India. Landsat TM and OLI imageries are classified using supervised classification to find out the land use changes for a span of 32 years (1988-2020). It was found that substantial changes in the scrub forest category with a loss of 177 sq km (out of 842 sq km area) that occurred mainly due to various anthropogenic activities. The classification based on spectral data of Landsat TM and Landsat OLI produced an overall accuracy of about 92.3% for the year 1988 and 86.7% for the year 2020. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) analysis has been integrated for improving the classification accuracy. In the study region, significant changes being occurred in the forested ecosystem and it must be restored for the welfare of the tribal communities who are largely depending upon the natural resources for their livelihood.
Sarhad Journal of Agriculture, 2022
P lanning for sustainable economic, social, environmental, and land resources are critical because of population growth and global climate change (Ashraf, 2020; Matin et al., 2019). Due to the enormous burden of agriculture and urbanization, various human activities are underway to use the earth's natural resources , which are decreasing rapidly. Therefore, remote sensing satellite data are shown to be very useful for the analysis and mapping of land cover (Lasko et al., 2018; Levizzani et al., 2019). Even if the resulting spatial dataset has different resolutions, this change can be monitored using a GIS approach (Giuliani et al., 2020; Munsi et al., 2010). It is essential to fill in the literature about land use and land cover changes Abstract | In the sustainable management of natural resources, land use and land cover (LULC) changes play an essential role. Pakistan is rich in biodiversity and provides ecosystem services to the country's population, especially the mountains of the northern highland. These areas have experienced extensive depletion of ecosystem services and are susceptible to fast LULC changes. Real-time monitoring and assessment based on spatio-temporal are important to know such LULC changes. This study examines LULC in the northern mountains of Pakistan from MODIS (MCD12Q1) time series from 2001 to 2018. LULC was classified into ten significant classes. Findings of the data revealed that shrublands (0.33-0.17%), grasslands (45.83-41.74), and cropland (12.71-10.47) were decreased significantly. At the same time, savannas, permanent wetlands, urban and built-up lands, natural vegetation, permanent snow and ice, and barren lands increased substantially over the entire period. Due to the lack of baseline data, the LULC map will play an essential role in the sustainable management of LULC in the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalayan regions of Pakistan. For the sustainable maintenance of the mountainous ecosystem, comprehensive research is recommended about these LULC vulnerabilities locally and regionally.
Mapping and Attributing Normalized Difference Vegetation Index Trends for Nepal
2017
Global change is affecting vegetation cover and processes through multiple pathways. Long time series of surface land surface properties derived from satellite remote sensing offer a unique abilities to observe these changes, particularly in areas with complex topography and limited research infrastructure. Here, we focus on Nepal, a biodiversity hotspot where vegetation productivity is limited by moisture availability (dominated by a summer monsoon) at lower elevations and by temperature at high elevations. We analyze normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from 1981 to 2015 semimonthly, at 8 km spatial resolution. We use a random forest (RF) of regression trees to generate a statistical model of NDVI as a function of elevation, land use, CO2 level, temperature, and precipitation. We find that NDVI has increased over the studied period, particularly at low and middle elevations and during fall (post-monsoon). We infer from the fitted RF model that the NDVI linear trend is pri...
ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2018
Forest ecosystems play a key role in global ecological balance and provide a variety of tangible and intangible ecosystem services that support the livelihoods of rural poor. In addition to the anthropogenic pressure on the forest resources, climate change is also impacting vegetation productivity, biomass and phenological patterns of the forest. There are many studies reported all over the world which use change in Land Use Land Cover (LULC) to assess the impact of climate change on the forest. Land use change (LC) refers to any anthropogenic or natural changes in the terrestrial ecosystem at a variety of spatial or temporal scale. Changes in LULC induced by any causes (natural/anthropogenic) play a major role in global as well as regional scale pattern which in turn affects weather and climate. Remote sensing (RS) data along with Geographic Information System (GIS) help in inventorying, mapping and monitoring of earth resources for effective and sustainable landscape management of forest areas. Accurate information about the current and past LULC including natural forest cover along with accurate means of monitoring the changes are very necessary to design future adaptation strategies and formulation of policies in tune of climate change. Therefore, this study attempts to analyze the changes of LULC of Kanha Tiger Reserve (KTR) due to climate change. The rationale for selecting KTR is to have a largely intact forest area without any interference so that any change in LULC could be attributed to the impact of climate change. The change analysis depicted changes in land use land cover (LULC) pattern by using multi-temporal satellite data over a period of time. Further, these detected changes in different LULC class influence the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. As the study site is a Sal dominated landscape; the findings could be applied in other Sal dominated landscape of central India in making future policies, adaptation strategies and silvicultural practices for reducing the vulnerability of forest-dependent communities.
IEEE Access, 2020
As a key ecological zone of terrestrial ecosystem, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) region has experienced a significant change of vegetation coverage in recent years. Using the GIMMS NDVI3g, this study investigated the patterns of spatiotemporal variation of vegetation coverage in the BRI region during the period 1982-2015. The Theil-Sen Median trend analysis and Mann-Kendall method were used to analyze the data, followed by the calculation of Hurst index in order to analyze future trends of vegetation coverage. In addition, possible environmental factors affecting this variation were identified by using the partial correlation analysis and residual analysis methods. The results of the study showed that (1) the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) of the study area revealed a slow decrease during 1982-2015, with the linear tendency being-0.1%/10a. During this period, a stable increase was detected before 1997 (linear tendency 1.4%/10a), followed by a sharp decline after 1997 (linear tendency-1.8%/10a). (2) In spatial, the areas with increased vegetation NDVI are mainly distributed in Europe, India and China, whereas the regions with decreased vegetation NDVI are mainly distributed in northern Russia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Malay Islands, and northeast China, of which, the magnitude of decrease in the north of Russia is particularly remarkable. This phenomenon indicates that vegetation activities in high latitude regions declined, such as coniferous forest of subfrigid zone and tundra vegetation. (3) The same characteristic of vegetation coverage change were stronger than the reverse characteristics. A total of 89.2% of the study area's vegetation will change in the same way as in the past, with a continuously increasing area accounting for 34.0% and a continuously decreasing area accounting for 21.6%. (4) Although climate change may play a key role in vegetation growth trends on a long-term scale, human activities are also an important factor driving vegetation change in the BRI area, especially for areas with increased vegetation coverage such as China, India, and Europe. INDEX TERMS The belt and road initiative, vegetation, variation analysis.