The forests of the Nethravathi watershed in the Western Ghats landscape of India are a key habitat that connects two important large mammal habitats. The watershed is a heterogeneous matrix of tropical forests, settlements, and agricultural plantations of rubber, coffee, tea, and areca. In the last two decades, these forests have been subject to tremendous pressure from the construction of several linear infrastructure intrusion projects, ranging from roads to river diversion dams. Due to the limited understanding of the composition of this landscape and the impacts of intrusions on wildlife, nonprofits and other stakeholders find it difficult to present evidence-based opposition to such projects.
Results/Conclusions
As a first step towards understanding the landscape, I mapped intrusions and quantified forest loss in the watershed using remote sensing and GIS. The heterogeneity of the landscape posed a major challenge in creating a land-use map. I relied on fieldwork, topographic maps and red-edge bands of Sentinel 2 satellite imagery to distinguish plantation crops from forests. Since authoritative spatial datasets of linear intrusions were not readily available, this data was collated from open data sources and processed. This along with the land-use map was used as baseline data for analysis. In this poster, I will discuss this workflow of data collation and mixed methods of analysis to quantify forest losses from projects that have been implemented and those that will be implemented in the future.