Forest Resource Sustainability and Vegetation Dynamics Analysis Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

Abstract

Forests are essential to ecological balance, biodiversity, climate regulation and environmental resource maintenance. Since these times, deforestation, land-use change, urbanization and climate change have adversely impacted the sustainability and health of forests around the world. Forest resources should be monitored and assessed continuously for effective environmental management and sustainable policy planning. Field-based monitoring methods are typically labor intensive, with limited spatial coverage, and thus require more advanced geospatial technologies. This study aims to cover spatial and temporal vegetation changes, land use/land cover (LULC) dynamic, identification of forest degradation regions, assessment of sustainability indicators with remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS). The multi-temporal satellite data was used for vegetation and forest analysis which included Landsat 8, Sentinel-2 and MODIS data. The techniques used included supervised LULC classification, NDVI-based vegetation assessment, GIS spatial analysis and multi-temporal change detection. The findings indicated differences in the distribution of vegetation and forest cover, thus, revealing forest regions that are vulnerable and need to be protected through forest management. Finally, the study suggests that remote sensing and GIS are effective and cost efficient tools for sustainable assessment and management of forests over the long-term.