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Landscape Dynamics in Western Himalaya - Mandhala Watershed, Himachal Pradesh, India |
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Ramachandra T V 1,2,* Uttam Kumar 1,2 Joshi N V1
1 Energy & Wetlands Research Group, Center for Ecological Sciences [CES],
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka, 560 012, India
2 Centre for Sustainable Technologies (astra),Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka, 560 012, India
*Corresponding author: cestvr@ces.iisc.ernet.in
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Abstract
Inventorying, mapping and monitoring landscape dynamics is essential for the sustainable management of natural resources including land and water. This work uses the temporal remote sensing data (1982, 1989, 2000 and 2007) for understanding landscape dynamics of Mandhala watershed in an ecologically fragile Himalayan region. Changes in land use and land cover are studied through established change detection techniques such as principal component analysis, correspondence analysis and NDVI based image differencing. Changes in forest land use are characterized by developing a forest fragmentation model involving various spatial metrics. The forest fragmentation and landscape metrics illustrate an increase in patch forests after 2000 and decline in the interior dense forest (90.4% to 33.4%) suggesting immediate policy interventions to restore the degraded landscape which had telling influence on local ecology, biodiversity and hydrology.
Keywords: landscape, land use change detection, forest fragmentation, watershed, multivariate analysis, Western Himalaya
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Citation : Ramachandra T.V., Uttam Kumar and Joshi N.V., 2012. Landscape Dynamics in Western Himalaya - Mandhala Watershed, Himachal Pradesh, India., Asian Journal of Geoinformatics, Vol.12,No.1 (2012).
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