ANNOUNCEMENTS
The anthropogenic activities taking place in an environment have the power to alter the habitat of a particular region. It is very important to understand and identify such threats which allows a researcher to monitor and predict the changes that might occur over a period of time. MNP is home to many endangered and endemic species which are very much dependent on the unique grassland habitat of the region. This paper tries to understand the influx of domestic cattle inside the park with relation to the soil compaction caused due to overgrazing. Physical soil parameters such as Bulk Density, Water content and Soil porosity are taken into consideration to understand if they have any impact in the vegetation composition of the unique mosaic grassland habitat of MNP. The increase in observation of domestic cattle might be also due to developmental of urban structures which has diminished many of the grazing ground at the periphery of the national parks. A pixel-based classification was carried out using satellite imagery to analyse the change in the habitat for a period of 21 years (1999-2020) and the change in classes was calculated with the help of a change transition matrix. Ground truth data and defining land cover were some of the key elements in improving the accuracy assessment of the classified images. The grassland is not homogenous in vegetation and is subjected to size reduction due to many climatic and anthropogenic activity aided by ecological succession, The grazing intensity and the spatial distribution is very well studied in this research. However, with studies like we hope to address some of the problem that can help the grassland habitat to thrive back to its glory.
Keywords: Southern Boundary, Bulk Density, Water Content, Soil Porosity, Ecological Successions, Habitat Classification, Supervised Classification, Unsupervised Classification, Error Matrix, Change Transition Matrix.
