Remote Sensing Application for Analysis of Forest Change Detection

Forest cover is generally defined as the relative in percent or square kilometers/square miles of land area which is occupied by forests. And the coverage of global forest cover is most essential for soil health, climate, water cycle and air quality. The condition can be improved by reforestation and afforestation to some extent but cannot be restored to full range. Once the natural forests are converted to various lands uses it's impossible to restore these ecological services. The terms “deforestation” and “forest area net change” are different as deforestation is defined as the forest losses while forest net change may possess some expansion and degradation of forests in a given period. The rate of deforestation has increased the loss of forests and due to this environmental misbalance is occurring. So if this continued then various parameters of environment like climate, quality of soil etc. can be degraded and may not be cured. Therefore, the following research is geared towards analyzing the parts of deforestation using remote sensing technology of a particular Yavatmal district of Maharashtra state, India. The satellite images used for this analysis of forest change detection are of planet scope having 3 m resolution. The target of this research is to detect the forest cover change using remote sensing and GIS. For the identification of forest covers various techniques like segmentation and classification are used. The best classification is by Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) which identifies the health of vegetation along with the changes in the different parameters. After using NDVI some values generated will detect the areas of forest changes with the amount of change. And with the help of this research it is observed that out of total forest area i.e. 76740.32 hectares, the negative forest change is reduced to 29.44% due to degradation of forests maybe due to fires, deforestation, leaf shedding etc.