GEOSPATIAL MONITORING OF FORESTS A CASE STUDY OF PIRPANJAL FOREST DIVISION, J&K

The forests of Jammu & Kashmir are mostly located in inaccessible areas where assessment of its ecological health is very difficult. The conventional surveys become useless for chalking out future management strategies because by the time data becomes available, it no longer represents the ground reality in its entirety. The conservation strategies demand near accurate and near real time spatial data. The remote sensing technique has emerged as a powerful tool to map and monitor the natural resources especially in inaccessible and hilly areas and that too economically, accurately and within a short span of time. The temporal satellite data helps in monitoring the forest cover repetitively. Using remote-sensing data, statistical sampling, and change-detection methods, this research shows how land conversion varies spatially and temporally from 1972–2012. The analysis shows that agricultural land use has continued to increased; however, an important land-cover transition has occurred, from a mode of regional forest-cover gain to one of forest-cover loss caused by timber cutting cycles, urbanization, and other land-use demands. The study area represents the forest division of Pir-Panjal area which is economically growing fast by converting the forest to agricultural, pasture and built-up land for the past few decades. The Landsat images of the year 1972, 1980, 1992, 2001 and IRS LISS-IV imagery of 2012 were analyzed to detect the changes in the land-use / land-cover in the past four decades. The analysis reveals that there has been 4.98% decrease in the forest cover over the past decades and the area is getting degraded in terms of ecological health. The period from 1992 to 2001 witnesses a high annual net rate of deforestation. About 21.32% of pasture and scrub area has increased during this period as per the geospatial analysis.