Spatio—Temporal Changes of Forest Cover in Baramulla District

Abstract

The present study aims to study the forest cover change detection in district Baramulla from 1980 to 2014. Normalized Deference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was used to measure the change detection. The images of two different time periods 1980 (MSS) and 2014 (OLI) have been used to measure the change detection in the study area. Spatial and Radiometric Enhancement has been carried out to improve the image quality. The resulted values between -1 and +1 were classified as no vegetation, sparse vegetation, moderate vegetation and dense vegetation. The result of vegetation changes in the study area demonstrates that there has been drastic decline in dense vegetation cover 102.41 km² from 1980 to 2014. Then the study further went on to classify only the forest, so the defined forest boundary by the Government of India was used to separate the forest and non-forest area in the district. Then the separated forest area have been classified based on the result of NDVI values as dense, moderate, spares, blank and non-forest. The forest cover has been classified into four categories blank <0, sparse 0-0.2, moderate 0.2-0.4, dense >0.4. Dense Forest has reduced by 177.29 Km² followed by sparse forest 123.52 Km² while as blank forests has increased by 186.83 Km². The forest change detection reveals that major changer was observed from dense forest to moderate forest 138.59 Km² and from sparse forest to blank forest 167 Km².

Keywords: NDVI, Change Detection, GIS, forest cover, Remote Sensing

Cite this Article
Mudasir Majid Malik, Javaid Ahmad Tali, Asima Nusrath. Spatio—Temporal Changes of Forest Cover in Baramulla District. Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS. 2017; 8(3): 1–7p.