Remote Sensing Based Forest Health Analysis Using GIS along Fringe Forests of Kollam District, Kerala

Abstract

Remote sensing and GIS has gained momentum in monitoring land use change as well as forest fragmentation due to availability of Landsat satellite data. Kollam Forests sustains extensive deforestation and forest fragmentation, but data and documentation highlighting this transformation of the Western Ghats are limited. The major endeavour of this study is to compute forest fragmentation employing LFT and interpretation of fragmented forest area during the past decade (2001-2017).Two time frame data sets of 2001 and 2017 were used for assessing forest fragmentation. Forest intactness is measured by the proportion of four spatial patterns i.e. core, perforated, edge and patches. Erstwhile tree cover and density was considered as the yardstick to measure forest health and ecosystem but recent studies regarding forest fragmentation has disclosed many harmful impacts of the same. The study intended to develop two land use maps of the experimental area based on maximum likelihood algorithm of supervised classification method and to assess the rate of land degradation. The consequent supervised classified data is subsequently reclassified using reclassify tool of ArcGIS 9.3v. The reclassified image is used as input in landscape fragmentation tool LFT v2.0 to construct a forest fragmentation maps and analyse forest fragmentation pattern during (2001-2017). The results revealed that there was a great spatial variability in the pattern of forest loss and land use change throughout the region which in turn affected the species diversity.