Analysing Land Use/Land Cover Changes, Prediction and Fragmentation in Jaldapara-Buxa Forest and its Corridor, West Bengal, India, Using Geoinformatics

Abstract

Forest fragmentation and habitat loss are the common problems and recognized as one of the key issues of the biodiversity conservation in Buxa Tiger Reserve and Jaldapara National Park, West Bengal, India. These two protected areas represent the high level of biodiversity coexistence as well as the man-wildlife conflict. These forests have witnessed a long history of forest cover change, deforestation and reforestation and forest fragmentation for the past few decades. The present study deals with the evaluation of forest cover change and predict the future status of the two protected areas and their respective corridors using Cellular Automata Markov Model and the comparison of habitat fragmentation and its change. Changes have shown during the two decades between 1995 and 2015, where large area of dense forest had been converted into plantation or open forest areas. The degradation of the forest increased in the first decade but decreased in the second decade due to some positive activity taken by the forest department. It was found that the fragmentation level of these two protected areas increased by the past two decades. The considerable changes in forest patch areas could be important features for some larger mammals and the fragmentation could affect largely in those species and also increase the rate of human-wildlife conflict. The predicted LULC map of the year 2035 shows the declining trend of dense forest area by 3.4% as well as the increase of the open forest or plantation by 1.07% respectively.