Forest Cover Dynamics Study of Koraput District Odisha in Relation to Climate Change Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Abstract

Forest ecosystem encompasses the highest amount of global terrestrial biodiversity with more than 60,000 tree species out of which about 20,000 are under the IUCN red list and 8,000 of them have been listen in the threatened category (MEA 2005; BGCI 2019; FAO 2020). However, in tropical forests plant diversity is not evenly distributed, with 93,500 plant species in tropical America with highest species richness followed by Asia with 62,000 and Africa with 20,000 numbers of species (Primack and Corlett 2005). Agriculture, occupying approximately 40 % of the available land surface coupled with socio-economic activities like urbanization and human settlement expansion constituting about 85 % of earth surface has converted the developing counties like India into hotspots for deforestation (Sanderson et al. 2002; Geist and Lambin 2002). Shifting cultivation being a prevalent land-use operation in biodiversity rich countries (Laurance 1999; Geist and Lambin 2002) is responsible for causing high rate of deforestation globally (Baccini et al. 2012).