FOREST MAPPING USING IRS - 1C DATA

Abstract

Forests in India have been suffered serious depletion over the years which have led to several adverse consequences. There has been land degradation and erosion of top soils resulting in droughts and perceptible variations. Human interventions like, landuse conversions, deforestation and environmental pollution act is accelerators._ Out of 75 million ha land area recorded as forest, satellite image shows that only 63.01 million ha area recorded has the forest cover, and the remaining area is without any vegetation. Therefore, the forest benefits which flow from forests have considerably reduced due to deteriorating condition of the forest. The advent of satellite remote sensing is a timely technological development in order to monitor natural resources. The forest mapping using remote sensing technique is most appropriate tool to check feature depletion and evolve strategy for effective forest management. The present study was carried out in two test areas of Doon valley, to evaluate digital data of IRS - 1C . Attempts .have been made to assess sensitivity of IRS - 1C data to various enhancement techniques normally used for highlighting landcover features. The multi-spectral (MS) data along with PAN data, has been evaluated for discrimination/classification of forest/vegetation features. It is observed that while MS data can provide. Level - II information in forest, combination of PAN can provide Level - III information. The texture information derived from PAN increases the overall accuracy by 3% _and also -provide more detail discrimination. The grey level distribution (assessed from histograms) in all the three sensors WiFS, LISS-III and PAN- show variability in the landcover features. The redundancy of the data in multi-spectral bands have-also been found to be within reasonable limits. The information content-ird-R—&-SWIR have been found to be very high. Thus IRS - 1C is the latest state- of - art satellite with most advanced combination of sensor systems, capable of providing regional to detailedinformation on the natural resources.