Forests cover <30 percent today globally as opposed to 50 percent of the earth's land area 8000 years ago depleted with the expanded extents of croplands, pastures, plantations, and urban areas (FAO 2011). The Earth's land surface has lost 40 percent of natural forest by 1990 due to the expansion of cropland and permanent pasture (Ramachandra and Shruthi 2007). The accelerating rates of land use land cover (LULC) changes across globe are affecting forest landscapes and climate. There are ample evidences of these fast changes, which are affecting forest ecosystem worldwide (Nelson et al., 2006; Azevedo et al., 2014). The uncontrolled land use changes, such as intensification of agriculture, industrialisation, often associated with fast population growth are triggering forest cover loss and fragmentation especially in tropical and subtropical regions (DeFries et al., 2010; Bharath et al., 2014; Ramachandra et al., 2016; Ramachandra and Bharath, 2018). LULC changes are influenced by resource-led or policy-led (Gollin et al., 2016) by exerting sustained pressure on land scape (Zhou et al., 2017). The rampant land transformation and urbanisation due to accelerated economic performance across the regions stressing the environment, degrading vital natural resources. The 10% of the world's population lives in wooded mountain regions, with livestock contributing significantly to their economy, which signifies the pressure on forests (Pranab, 2016). The abrupt changes in forest landscape resulting in imbalance of ecosystem and climate interactions (Bharath et al., 2013; Ramachandra et al., 2018a). LULC change impulses a range of environmental challenges by disrupting the processes of biogeochemical and hydrological systems at the local, regional (Vinay et al., 2013) and global scales (Fletcher et al., 2013).

Conservative natural resource management should take into account the sustenance of natural resources and people’s livelihood aspects. This entails holistic approaches in development of forested regions for appropriately preserve the areas of various LU classes considering the ecological and environmental services for maintaining the inter-generational equity. The sound knowledge on natural and human-induced forces of landscape changes helps ecologists and decision makers to focus on the development of sustainable solutions to curtail future ecological implications. The numerous simulation models are developed in recent time which attempts to gather sound knowledge of landscape change process and the possible paths of a landscape protection (Sirakoulis et al., 2000). The fuzzy analytical hierarchical process with cellular automata (Fuzzy-AHP-CA) modeling technique is considered as effective approach of LULC change modelling and prediction. The hybrid modelling techniques provides more advantageous of integrating agents along with rule based approaches (Ramachandra et al., 2017). The standalone CA-Markov or agent based modelling suffers with limitations of agents and neighbourhood behavior in the simulation (Ramachandra e al., 2018a). Hybrid approaches exhibit an extensive knowledge base on how the agents of changes interact with each other to be responsible for social and physical environment of forested regions and their immediate vicinity.

The focus on ecological security, in addition to sustainable human development projects, have raised concerns for preservation of food sources and ecosystems in recent time (Vihervaara et al., 2010).The identification of ecological fragile regions approach is providing a new perspective for the assessment of environmental resources, sustainable development. This framework focuses on various aspects of the region such as environmental quality, develop a sound and appealing evidence base, emphasizing inclusive public involvement in planning, evaluating wide range of alternatives (Ramachandra et al., 2018b). The mapping of ecological fragile zones will lend guidance to responsible agencies to ensure a balance between ecological preservation and development. Geo-visualisation of hotspots of biodiversity at local level and prioritisation of ecological fragile regions helps in evolving appropriate conservation strategies for the implementation of sustainable developmental through the involvement of local stakeholders (Ramachandra et al., 2018c). The prioritisation and strategies framed will help in prudent use of natural resources, while realizing the vision of Biodiversity act, 2002, towards empowering Biodiversity Management Committees at village level. In this regard, the objectives of the current research are
(i) Quantification of spatio temporal land use changes from 1973 to 2018.
(ii) Visulaisng likely changes in the Kodagu considering the deforestation trend
(iii) Identification of ecological fragile zones for effective conservation and management