Geospatial approach for tiger habitat evaluation and distribution in Corbett Tiger reserve, India

Abstract

India has a rich repository of flora and fauna, but the rapid decline of wildlife and threat to its habitat has been a serious cause of concern. Hence, protected areas have been set up to achieve specific conservation objectives to facilitate timely and reliable information on forest types and its composition, degradation status and their suitability for different species of flora and fauna. In the present study, evaluation of tiger habitat in Corbett Tiger reserve is carried out using remote sensing, ground and other ancillary sources and is integrated using GIS using multi-criteria model. The results indicated that sal, mixed sal, miscellaneous forest, plantation, grassland, agriculture and scrub land are the major land use/land cover types and majority of the study area is covered under dense forest. Tiger habitat suitability analysis showed that large proportion of the area (51.4%) was found to be highly suitable followed by moderately suitable area (31%). Further, the correlation drawn between range-wise suitability area and actual tiger population in Corbett Tiger Reserve CTR indicated a positive correlation of 0.73. Disturbance to wildlife habitat, vegetation degradation and shrinking passage corridor are the major concern in CTR.

Remote Sensing and GIS-Based Suitability Modeling of Medicinal Plant (<I>Taxus baccata</I> Linn.) in Tawang District, Arunachal Pradesh, India

“…According to Phillips et al 21 , the MaxEnt approach estimates a species environmental niche by finding a probability distribution that is based on a distribution of MaxEnt (with reference to a set of environmental variables). On the other hand, Benito et al 22 calculated extinction risk through species distribution model for an endangered plant, while Singh et al 23 used multi-criteria model in GIS for tiger habitat suitability and distribution evaluation in Corbett Tiger Reserve.…”

Integrating geospatial tools and species for conservation planning in a data-poor region of the Far Eastern Himalayas

“…In delineating suitable habitat areas, all thematic layers and topographic layersincluding digital elevation model (DEM), slope and topographic position data, settlement and road datawere analysed (Table 3) as they were found to have a direct correlation to the suitability of wildlife habitat (Nandy Kushwaha, & Gaur, 2012;Singh, Velmurugan, & Dakhate, 2009). After the habitat factors had been chosen, suitability scores assigned to each of the factors (e.g., land cover types, topographic position classes) paying particular attention to the suitability threshold required to support breeding habitat for each of the species.…”

How to Predict Nesting Sites and How to Measure Shoreline Erosion: Fuzzy and Probabilistic Techniques for Environment-Related Spatial Data Processing

“…When analyzing the ecological systems, it is important to study the spatial environment of these systems, and spatial distribution of the corresponding species in this spatial environment; see, e.g., [1], [3], [7].…”