Spatio-Temporal analysis of forest conversion in contrasting LULC and vegetation extraction using spatial information southern part of Jangalmahal, West Bengal, India

Abstract

Forest plays very important role in climate control and carbon sequestration. The study analyzed the spatio-temporal changes in forest cover and detects the factors influencing forest cover changes in southern Part of Jangalmahal using Remote Sensing and GIS techniques. In order to evaluate changes in forest, satellite images are collected from Landsat 7 ETM+ of 2000 & Sentinel-2B 2020 are also pre-processed and classified. SRTM image was use for showing the topographic of the study area. The SVM classification techniques used to derive LULC maps from Landsat and Sentinel-2B images of each year in ENVI 5.3. The accuracy of classification is more than 80%. LULC change matrix was performed to show the conversions of forest land to other Land Use and Land Cover classes. The LULC results shows that there was an increase trend in agricultural land and settlements are land use classes for decreasing of forest cover. Between 2000 and 2020 agricultural land increase 82.57sqkm (18.22%) and settlement 51.58sqkm (11.38%). The vegetation indices, NDVI mean was calculated by remote sensing technique for each year. NDVI change matrix was calculated through Erdas Imagine and ArcGIS raster calculator reclassify tool for analyzing the rate of forest cover changes in this study area. After analyzing the NDVI change matrix the results demonstrate that between the 2000 and 2020 forest is 15676.11 hectors (29.77%) decreased and 5922.10 hectors (11.21%) increased, indicating that more forest cover decreased over time a trend that does not bode well for the maintenance of biodiversity in this area.