Land cover dynamics and their driving factors in a protected floodplain ecosystem

Abstract

Floodplains are simultaneously the most productive and threatened ecosystems in the world, with land cover integrity compromised even in "protected" floodplains.Due to their rich biodiversity, monitoring of land cover and understanding the causative drivers becomes imperative in the protected floodplains. This work performs spatio-temporal assessment of land cover changes and discovers the underlying processes in the largest protected floodplain of the Brahmaputra River (BR)-Kaziranga

Environmental drivers of space-time dynamics in floodplain vegetation: grasslands as habitat for megafauna in Bardia National Park (Nepal)

“…It is especially vital to understand the functioning of such a valuable ecosystem in relation to possible changes in drivers (such as the indicated redistribution of discharge in 2009) in order to provide insight for nature management 115 strategies aiming to conserve grasslands and associated fauna, such as the abundance of tiger's prey and the endangered tiger itself (Harihar et al, 2014), and also to expand on the knowledge for similar systems where grasslands sustain prey-predator relationships. A promising method for studying land cover dynamics and its drivers is the use of earth observation techniques, which enable 120 diachronic analysis contributing valuable data and insights on the development of land cover (Lallias-Tacon et al, 2017;Dufour et al, 2019;Harezlak et al, 2020;Solins et al, 2017;Basumatary et al, 2021;Louzada et al, 2020;Van Iersel, 2020;Corenblit et al, 2010;. With remotely sensed imagery from satellites, vegetation in and near floodplains can be mapped at the following scales and characteristics: vegetation types (Alaibakhsh et al, 2017), species composition (Rapinel et al, 2019;Plakman et al, 2020), physiological processes (Wagner-Lücker et al, 2013) and vegetation structure 125 (Straatsma and Baptist, 2008;Jalonen et al, 2015).…”