Monitoring of Land use/ land cover changes of Daying Ering Wildlife Sanctuary, Arunachal Pradesh, India, using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System

Abstract

The advent of geospatial technology plays a vital role in identifying environmental problems and provides solutions to good decision-making. In India, much of wildlife research and management occurs in protected areas. Therefore, it is imperative to study the landscape dynamics of such areas. The present study aimed to investigate the spatio-temporal of land use/land cover (LULC) changes that occurred in Daying Ering wildlife sanctuary, East Siang District, Arunachal Pradesh, for 10 years (2012-2022). The LULC were categorized into vegetation, water body, marsh, riverbed, and grassland. Supervised classification was used with the maximum likelihood algorithm in ERDAS 15.0 software. Post-assessment of the study area images revealed that there had been some major land changes whereby grassland has decreased by 25.10 %, an increase in the river bed (16.73%), and an increase in the water body (16.16%). The findings of the present study call for attention from researchers, environmentalists, policymakers, government officials and local villagers to study the consequences of LULC changes on vulnerable species and form mitigation/management measures accordingly.