The forest park landscape is a cultural “anthropogenic landscape”, which assumes optimal and rational use of natural resources in order to create favorable conditions for mass recreation in the natural forest environment. The impact of recreation on the forest park areas, as well as on the territory of all protected areas, has a number of regularities. In cases where the number of visitors significantly above the acceptable level, and resistance is relatively low, the anthropogenic impact is not only visible, but can be damaging to the individual components of the environment, and sometimes to the whole complex in general. Such an impact causes a response from the natural environment. The analysis of the state of the Medvedkovsky forest park was carried out to recognize the main determinants of the negative repercussions on this territory. For this purpose, the flora and fauna, the road and path network, the degree of recreational digression of the territory, as well as the noise impact exerted on it due to its proximity to the MKAD (Moscow ring road) were taken in account.
Filling in the void between forest ecology and remote sensing through monitoring biodiversity variables is of great interest. In this study, we utilized imaging spectroscopy data from the ISRO–NASA Airborne Visible InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer—Next Generation (AVIRIS-NG) India campaign to investigate how the measurements of biodiversity attributes of forests over wide areas can be augmented by synchronous field- and spectral-metrics. Three sites, Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary (SWS), Vansda National Park (VNP), and Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR), spread over a climatic gradient (rainfall and temperature), were selected for this study. Abundant species maps of three sites were produced using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier with a 76–80% overall accuracy. These maps are a valuable input for forest resource management. Convex hull volume (CHV) is computed from the first three principal components of AVIRIS-NG spectra and used as a spectral diversity metric. It was observed that CHV increased with species numbers showing a positive correlation between species and spectral diversity. Additionally, it was observed that the abundant species show higher spectral diversity over species with lesser spread, provisionally revealing their functional diversity. This could be one of the many reasons for their expansive reach through adaptation to local conditions. Higher rainfall at MTR was shown to have a positive impact on species and spectral diversity as compared to SWS and VNP. Redundancy analysis explained 13–24% of the variance in abundant species distribution because of climatic gradient. Trends in spectral CHVs observed across the three sites of this study indicate that species assemblages may have strong local controls, and the patterns of co-occurrence are largely aligned along climatic gradient. Observed changes in species distribution and diversity metrics over climatic gradient can help in assessing these forests’ responses to the projected dynamics of rainfall and temperature in the future.
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