Socio-economic impact on vulnerability of tropical forests of Eastern Ghats using hybrid modelling
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Tropical Ecology https://doi.org/10.1007/s42965-020-00106-5
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Socio-economic impact on vulnerability of tropical forests of Eastern Ghats using hybrid modelling Rakesh Paul1 · Subhashree Patra1 · Kakoli Banerjee1 Received: 28 June 2020 / Revised: 22 August 2020 / Accepted: 2 September 2020 © International Society for Tropical Ecology 2020
Abstract Forest vulnerability assessment has been proven paramount from regional to global scale in order to determine the natural as well as socio-economic pressure exerted on the ecosystem. The hybrid of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with Weighted Overlay Modelling (WOM) has proven to be effective and has yielded desirable results with greater accuracies. In AHP, The highest weights were assigned to forest edge (DFE) (0.27) followed by roads (DRo) (0.22), shifting cultivation (0.11) and settlements (0.11) whereas the parameters river, slope, elevation and Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) were given lower priority values of 0.09, 0.08, 0.08 and 0.04, respectively. Among the total of 8856 number of grids of 1 km2 dimension, 1126 grids (12.71%) are under very high vulnerability and the high and medium vulnerability classes share 682 (7.70%) and 3 grids (0.03%), respectively of the total geographic area of the district. The Anthropogenic Disturbance Index (ADI) ranged from 4.6 to 61.5 and 1429.57 km2 forest area was common between the overall forest vulnerability and anthropogenically vulnerability indicating that forest vulnerability is occurring mostly due to the socio-economic activities. The causes may be attributed to the operation of two major mines and three major industries and mostly to the shifting cultivation which is one of the major socio-economic practices in the tribal dominated district. The REDD + programmes can be implemented at community levels by strengthening regional forest department and local communities for better management of forest resources through indigenous techniques without compromising the socio-economic and livelihood developments. Keywords Analytical hierarchy process · Anthropogenic disturbance index · Forest cover · Forest fragmentation · Grid analysis · Weighted overlay modelling
Introduction Forest ecosystem, which is distributed over four billion hectares are one of the most important terrestrial ecosystems on the globe (FAO 2020). Forests provide great socio-economic values, ecological perspectives, biodiversity and environmental securities to every form of life (Riswan and Hartanti 1995; Rao and Pant 2001; Munsi et al. 2012). However, since the past three decades the global forest cover has decreased drastically at an annual rate of 5.9 million hectares (FAO 2020). Anthropogenic disturbances such as land use expansion along with the loss of productive lands through various anthropogenic activities are increasingly restricting the * Kakoli Banerjee [email protected] 1
Department of Biodiversity and Conservation of Natural Resources, Central University of Odisha, Landiguda, 764020 Koraput,
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