Quantification and mapping of fragmented forest landscape in dry deciduous forest of Burdwan Forest Division, West Bengal, India

Structural pattern of a forest landscape may affect the habitat quality directly. Therefore, monitoring and assessing the changes of forest cover is important for a biodiversity as well as the local ecosystem. Forest fragmentation in unprotected land rapidly changes the forest shape and size in an entire landscape. The present study addresses the issues related to the changing pattern of Burdwan Forest Division (BFD) landscape during the past 29 years (1990-2019) using satellite images. The entire forest area was categorized into 38 forest patches. Supervised image classification using ArcGIS software was used to detect the temporal changes of the forest cover in BFD. Different landscape indices have also been calculated to consider fragmentation with the help of FragStat 4.2 software. The result of the forest cover changes shows that though there is a less variation of forest changes from 1990 (80.66% forest cover) to 2019 (80%) forest cover, patch level variation is striking. Result from different landscape indices shows that, the patches with larger size (ID-1, 6, 15, 17) are more fragmented and complex than the smaller (ID- 5, 9, 18). This result is also supported and validated by regression method. This study may be helpful for the forest division and planners for policy makers to mitigate the factors affecting the fragmentation of this protected forest and to adopt suitable strategies for maintain ecological balance.