Satellite monitoring for spatio-temporal changes occurring in forest area of Sariska Tiger Reserve by implementing GIS and Remote Sensing techniques

Abstract

Remotely sensed data is widely used in ecological applications because of it’s great advantages as it provides quick, accurate, cost-effective as well as a time effective method for mapping the vegetation cover. Forest areas are known as protected areas and are required to monitor regularly in order to understand the effectiveness of all the conservation measures. Changes occurring in forests have been unnoticed and anthropogenic practices are increasing without appropriate planning. Sariska Tiger Reserve has been monitored to detect the land use land cover (LULC) changes and fragmentation that took place within 10 years i.e. 2007- 2016 using geo-spatial tools (maximum likelihood supervised classification and post-classification change detection) by mapping the land cover. Land use land cover changes provide overall perspective of the landscape characteristics, which is usually due to the increasing socio-economic activities in the particular area. This study revealed that the dense forest cover has decreased by 3.83% over 10 years whereas the open forest area has increased by 5.76% followed by increase in agriculture.