A Model To Detect Forest Change Relating To Mining Using Google Earth Engine Application In Belitung Island, Indonesia

Belitung Island is one of the biodiversity hotspots in Indonesia that is best known for its multi-use landscape, tourism, large agricultural land, tin mining and all other activities. The main earning possibility of local people of the island is most efficiently lies in coastal activities and tin mining. Main challenges are persistent cloud cover over the steep and vegetated terrain that creates a problem in forest change mapping. This research was conducted to identify and visually analyse the forest loss or gain due to tin mining activity and settlement along with the consequences of illegal logging using the Google earth engine application. Furthermore, this study will also help to understand the areas of water bodies filled after mining making it inactive. Therefore, NDVI and MNDWI analysis have been conducted to calculate the index values using the (GEE) Google earth engine and graphically presented. Landsat +ETM, MODIS global land cover, Hansen global forest change and other remote sensing data applied to conduct this research. The results obtained from this study shows that the width of forestry land cover is decreased gradually from 2012 to 2017 and the active tin mining, agricultural land, and settlement are widely increased. The inactive tin-mined areas are filled with water that can be well understood from the elevation modelling. Furthermore, the forest gain is also increasing mildly as per the results of change detection in forest gain analysis from 2012 to 2017. This clearly indicates the change of forest resulting due to the active tin mining and inactive tin-mined water filled land as well as the human settlement.