Energy & Wetlands Research Group, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore – 560012, INDIA.
*Corresponding author: cestvr@ces.iisc.ernet.in

Study area

The area of interest for our present study is Uttar Kannada (Fig 1), one of the 30 districts of Karnataka (census 2011) and falls in biodiversity hotspot, the Western Ghats. It lies between 74°9′ to 75°10′ E longitude 13°55′ to 15°31′ N latitude. It extends from north to south to a maximum of 180 km‘s and from east to west a maximum width of 110km‘s. It is having lush green forests ranging from evergreen to dry deciduous. The study area is considered to identify significant human interventions that have led to increased rate of forest encroachment and habitat fragmentation, deterioration of forest ecosystem and extinction of many flora & fauna species.

Fig 1: Study area; Uttar Kannada, Karnataka, India.

4. DATA
Remote sensing data Landsat MSS (1979), TM (1999), ETM+ (2013) acquired from public domains at (http://glovis.usgs.gov/) and Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) was used. The details of the remote sensing data are given in table 1. In addition to this the topographic maps at a scale of 1:50000 were used to provide the base map and boundary layers of the study area. These maps provide the additional information to assist the interpretation of different land use types.

Table 1: Details of Remote Sensing Data.