Evaluation of long term forest fires in India with respect to state administrative boundary, forest category of LULC and future climate change scenario: A Geospatial Perspective

Abstract Analysing the forest fires events in climate change scenario is essential for protecting the forest from further degradation. Geospatial technology is one of the advanced tools that has enormous capacity to evaluate the number of data sets simultaneously and to analyse the hidden relationships and trends. This study has evaluated the long term forest fire events with respect to India’s state boundary, its seasonal monthly trend, all forest categories of LULC and future climate anomalies datasets over the Indian region. Furthermore, the spatial analysis revealed the trend and their relationship. The state wise evaluation of forest fire events reflects that the state of Mizoram has the highest forest fire frequency percentage (11.33%) followed by Chhattisgarh (9.39%), Orissa (9.18%), Madhya Pradesh (8.56%), Assam (8.45%), Maharashtra (7.35%), Manipur (6.94%), Andhra Pradesh (5.49%), Meghalaya (4.86%) and Telangana (4.23%) when compared to the total country’s forest fire counts. The various LULC categories which represent the forest show some notable forest fire trends. The category ‘Deciduous Broadleaf Forest’ retain the highest fire frequency equivalent to 38.1% followed by ‘Mixed Forest’ (25.6%), ‘Evergreen Broadleaf Forest’ (16.5%), ‘Deciduous Needle leaf Forest’ (11.5%), ‘Shrub land’ (5.5%), ‘Evergreen Needle leaf Forest’ (1.5%) and ‘Plantations’ (1.2%). Monthly seasonal variation of forest fire events reveal the highest forest fire frequency percentage in the month of ‘March’ (55.4%) followed by ‘April’ (28.2%), ‘February’ (8.1%), ‘May’ (6.7%), ‘June’ (0.9%) and ‘January’ (0.7%). The evaluation of future climate data for the year 2030 shows significant increase in forest fire seasonal temperature and abrupt annual rainfall pattern; therefore, future forest fires will be more intensified in large parts of India, whereas it will be more crucial for some of the states such as Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, Assam and in the lower Sivalik range of Himalaya. The deciduous forests will further degrade in future. The highlight/results of this study have very high importance because such spatial relationship among the various datasets is analysed at the country level in view of the future climate scenario. Such analysis gives insight to the policymakers to make sustainable future plans for prioritization of the various state forests suffering from forest fire keeping in mind the future climate change scenario.