National parks and protected areas play a vital role in ecosystem conservation and refuge for sensitive wild flora and fauna, while maintaining ecosystem balance. The human induced land use land cover (LULC) changes are adversely impacting these regions and resulting in the decline of ecosystem goods and biodiversity. The understanding of landscape dynamics in national parks and protected areas is crucial for government, planners, resource managers, and environmental protection agencies to conserve the valuable resources and for maintaining environmental integrity. LULC dynamics in the ecological sensitive regions such as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries of Central Western Ghats were evaluated to assess the role of protection in conservation of biodiversity using spatio temporal remote sensing data with 10 km buffer. The impacts of LULC change in buffer zones surrounding protected ecological reserves have important implications for the management and conservation. The temporal land use analyses reveal ADTR region has lost evergreen forest cover from 84.43 to 50.51% with the increase in anthropogenic activities. CA models are deterministic, stochastic or hybrid approach supporting wide application domains as compared with conventional mathematical tools of spatial simulation. Prediction of forest cover in 2025 is done through Markov-cellular automata (CA–Markov) helps in for inferring intensity, extent and also evolving appropriate forest management strategies of protected areas. The visualization can be aided in planning by enhancing transparency in the administration for sustainable management of natural resources and conservation of ecosystem.
Keywords— Land use Land cover, CA-Markov, Protected areas; National Parks; Central Western Ghats