Assessing the anthropogenic impacts on forest cover : Modeling spatio-temporal change pattern
Student name: Ms Madhushree Munsi
Guide: Dr P K Joshi
Year of completion: 2009
Host Organisation: IGCMC (WWF, India)
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr G. Areendran
Abstract: Forests are one of the most important ecosystems and act as a reservoir of biodiversity.
Forest and forest biodiversity are innately associated with human well-being. However, with
the accelerating urbanisation and other developmental activities, the rate of deforestation has
increased. Deforestation is an important aspect of land use land cover change (LULCC). It
affects various ecological processes at both regional and global level. Change analysis is an
important tool for forest cover monitoring and management. In the present study, change
analysis has been done to assess the change dynamics in forest cover. Land Change Modeler
(LCM) was used to model the LULCC. The study demonstrated that forested areas are getting
degraded due to anthropogenic activities, but they don’t contribute much in expanding urban
area. Agricultural areas and fallow lands are the main contributors to increased urban area.
Change prediction was done by using LCM. The model was validated by comparing actual
LULC of 2006 with the predicted LULC of 2006 and the accuracy was 61.03%. Then, the
temporal maps alongwith the drivers to LULCC were used to model the future land cover
distribution of 2010 and 2015. Soft prediction modeling showed that land covers with higher
human impact are more vulnerable to change. Landscape metric analysis, at landscape level
and class level, further helped in assessing the overall health of the ecosystem. Change
process analysis was done to study the landscape transformation types. The study
demonstrates potential of geospatial tools to understand the spatio-temporal forest cover
change and generate the future scenarios.
Keywords: Deforestation, Change prediction, Model validation, Landscape transformation
types, Landscape metrics.
