ANNOUNCEMENTS
Ecosystem services are the benefits that we people obtain from the ecosystem. These services are a critical component of human survival. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, these services are classified into four major categories. These include provisioning services, regulating services, cultural services, and supporting services. So these services range from necessities like food, fuel, and water to inherent services like soil formation. The study focusses on a high altitude wetland and wildlife sanctuary in the western Himalayas, Renuka Ji. With the place getting its name on the list of Ramsar sites, it has experienced rapid growth in developmental activities and the conversion of forest cover into barren lands which is destroying the ecosystem landscape and functions. To maintain the present condition and understand the causes of increased siltation, a land cover analysis was done for an area of 16 km2 within close proximity to the wetland. The satellite images for 1990, 2008, and 2018 were used for LULC supervised classification. For the classification, five LULC classes were taken. Accuracy assessment and Kappa analysis was done to ensure better reliability on this classification. The most extensive class of the area is forest cover i.e. 69.95%, followed by barren land at 23.93%. The overall accuracy of the classification for 1990, 2008, and 2018 is 92.50%, 95%, and 95% respectively and Kappa statistics is 0.9062, 0.9375, and 0.9375 for the following years. This quantitative data was then followed by the qualitative data in the form of PRA exercises which tells the trend of the change in ecosystem services. It complements the LULC data and the changes observed through exercises such as spatial mapping, the timeline of the events, trend analysis, seasonality, and ranking and scoring method. The long-term variation in rainfall provides seasonality and changes in the trend using R software. This is then verified with the data collected through PRA.
Keywords: Wetland, Renuka Ji, Ecosystem Service, Land Use Land Cover, Temporal Variation.
